NVIDIA Ampere to offer massively faster ray-tracing?

Last year, NVIDIA brought the first real-time ray-tracing implementation to the market with its Turing architecture. Long considered the holy grail of video game rendering, the GPU giant received a lot of ridicule for its "RTX On" as the benefits weren't crystal clear. It's often hard to spot the visual improvements and they come at a massive performance cost. However, ray tracing is here to stay and things are about to get better.

WCCF Tech claims they received a bunch of information about NVIDIA's upcoming Ampere GPU architecture. Expected to be launched in the first half of 2020, the "Ampere" RTX 3000 series will reportedly feature improved rasterization output as well as a "massive" uplift in ray tracing performance.

Additionally, the site heard that the RTX 3000 series will be made on a 7nm EUV process. There are no in-depth details but you can expect more video memory, 100-200MHz higher frequencies than Turing, and a lower power consumption than Turing. One small downside is that overclocking performance will reportedly be lower due to the lower voltages employed.

Gamers will also be happy to hear that NVIDIA is reportedly projecting a MSRP for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti that will be slightly less than the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. As always, take these rumors with a grain of salt.