Nvidia in 2021: the continued dominance of the Ampère

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• Nvidia in 2021: the continued dominance of the Ampère

In 2020, Nvidia has had an absolutely incredible year, finally releasing its Ampere graphics architecture, both for data centers and PC gaming. It was a huge improvement over what older cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti could offer, even hinting at what an 8K graphics card might look like with the RTX 3090. In many ways, Nvidia is just getting started with Ampere, especially considering that we still don't have mobile graphics or cheap graphics cards with the new architecture. And we can't forget the ARM deal looming on the horizon. If that comes to fruition, it would solidify Nvidia as one of the biggest tech companies in the game. So while Nvidia's 2020 was a massive hit list, 2021 is going to be louder and more ray-traced.

(Image credit: LaComparacion)

RTX for everyone?

Right now, if you want to get a card that supports all the tech that Nvidia is still making noise about, namely Ray Tracing, DLSS, and Nvidia Broadcast, you should get an RTX-branded card. The only problem is that Nvidia only produced mid-tier cards, so you need to shell out at least $349 ($319, AU$499) for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060. And, since this graphics card has apparently been discontinued, it's It drops to over $399 (£419, AU$799) for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. With Nvidia Turing, Nvidia prevents anyone with a budget under $349 (£319, AU$499) from seeing its future ray mapped, with graphics cards like the GTX 1660 and GTX 1650 Super avoiding RT and Tensor Cores and getting focused only on raster performance. One could argue that the main reason for this is that the Nvidia RTX 2060 was basically the bare minimum when it comes to power for this new technology, which begs the question: will we be getting an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 for $199 or less in 2021? From a performance standpoint, we don't see why. Just looking at the RTX 3060 Ti, this card is around 38-40% faster than the RTX 2060 Super, so we don't see why Nvidia couldn't make a cheap option that can enable all of the RT features we're getting. interest. love came during the last two years. Nvidia could keep its RTX brand at a premium, and while we can totally see Nvidia going down that path, we really hope it doesn't. Trust us: having a card capable of using Nvidia Broadcast is a boon for telecommuting, and opening it up to students or people without a lot of money to spare can only be a good thing. We expect Nvidia to do the right thing in 2021 and make cost-effective RTX graphics cards.

(Image credit: future)

PS5? Xbox Series X? What about tough gaming laptops?

Right now, even the best gaming laptops on the market still use Nvidia's RTX 20-series GPUs, but we don't think they'll last much longer. Looking at Turing as an example, the series of 20 graphics cards launched in September 2018 for desktops, and we only got the laptop versions of the cards on January 29, 2019 after they were revealed at CES a few days ago. weeks. before. This time, the Ampere lineup was led by the Nvidia RTX 3080 which launched in 2020, so if Nvidia follows the same timeline, we'll likely see laptops with the mobile GPU at CES this year. And damn, we've already started seeing leaked laptops with GPUs, so it seems pretty likely they're just around the corner. However, it is important to keep in mind the thermal and power limitations of a laptop. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, for example, has a total graphics power (TGP) of 350W on a desktop. The RTX 2080 Super for laptops, on the other hand, is limited to a 200W TGP for a full mobile GPU and just 90W for the much more popular Max-Q variant. So while we should be getting much more powerful mobile graphics relatively soon, don't expect a laptop to be able to max out Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing in 4K any time soon.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

When will people be able to buy graphics cards?

So if you've been looking for a graphics card lately, you've probably noticed that it's used pretty much everywhere all the time. And it's not just the new Nvidia maps, AMD Big Navi maps are nowhere to be found either. This is likely to continue through the first few months of 2021, but relief will come soon. We've heard the news of a multi-billion dollar manufacturing deal between Nvidia and Samsung. Samsung already made some of the first Ampere cards, so it would make sense for Team Green to trust Samsung to help meet the massive demand for their new graphics cards. However, it may be a few more months before consumers can reliably buy an Nvidia 30-series graphics card without furiously smashing F5 to grab one before a bot can. In many ways, the current stock market crash looks a lot like when crypto miners bought up all the graphics cards in 2017. Fortunately, most miners are using dedicated ASIC cards these days, so that's about it. really a matter of supply and demand. Hopefully, we'll start to see more availability of the RTX 3080 in the first half of 2021, so more people can get their hands on these fantastic graphics cards.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Don't forget ARM

In September 2020, Nvidia reached an agreement to buy ARM for €40 billion, although it has not been done yet. Last we heard, the FTC may be launching an antitrust investigation into the absolutely massive deal. We don't expect a resolution to happen immediately and will have to wait and see how it plays out. But if that happens, Nvidia will be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. While Nvidia is best known for its gaming products, the company is actually much bigger, involved in everything from exascale computing, artificial intelligence, data science, and self-driving cars. The addition of ARM would further expand its reach, and as we've started to see companies like Microsoft and Apple ditch traditional x86 processors for ARM processors, Nvidia could have an absolutely huge year in 2021.