Nvidia 7nm Ampere architecture reportedly boosts performance by 50% and halves power consumption

Nvidia's Geforce RTX series was revealed in August 2018, making the company's Turing series of graphics cards close to 17 months old. With this in mind, we know that the release of a next-generation RTX architecture must be in the works, as Nvidia cannot rest on the strengths of Turing forever. 

The Taipei Times has reported that Nvidia plans to release its next-generation Ampere series of GPUs in the second half of 2020, adopting 7nm manufacturing and new architectural enhancements to deliver significant performance and power efficiency boosts. 

Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards will reportedly ship with a 50% boost to graphics performance while halving power consumption, providing gamers with vast generational improvements. Sadly, these metrics do not describe what workload Nvidia's next-generation architecture is under, as this 50% boost could be referring to fully raytraced games, like Quake II RTX, or traditional rasterised games. 

What we will say here is that these rumoured numbers don't necessarily mean what they imply. A significant boost in raytracing performance with decreased power consumption is what should be expected from a second-generation RTX product, especially when combined with 7nm. It is also possible that Taiwan Times' source is incorrect, or is overestimating Ampere's performance. 

Regardless, Nvidia has had almost two years since the release of Turing to create a successor, and a shift from 12nm to 7nm will yield significant benefits which will complement any architectural enhancements that are made with Ampere. We are expecting big performance enhancements with Nvidia's RTX 30 series, or whatever Nvidia decides to call it.