Now that the next generation of high-end GPUs is reaching the end of their design phase and entering the testing phase, we’re getting more and more small chunks of information as we get closer to launching the cards later in 2022.
The latest rumors suggest that Nvidia’s next generation AD102 GPU could produce more than 100 TFLOPS of computer performance, which is more than double that of an RTX 3090 Ti. The information comes via a twitter discussion between serial and reliable leakers, Greymon55 and Kopite7kimi.
A TFLOP is one trillion floating point operations per second. It is a measure of a processor’s mathematical performance. A higher number does not necessarily mean better gaming performance, but having higher floating-point capabilities means that game developers have more resources to work with, even if other factors in the system create their own bottlenecks. Raw shader performance is an advantage, but it is only part of the GPU.
Although we expect the next generation card to have a large increase in core / shader numbers, the performance of 100 TFLOP is still more than expected. This also points in the direction of a significant increase in clock speed. The higher the clock speed, the higher the TFLOP performance.
Nvidia’s flagship GPU is not the only one expected to see a dramatic TFLOP boost. AMD’s RDNA3 GPUs are also expected to leapfrog. Greymon55 goes on to suggest that The 7900 XT could clock as high as 3GHzif not more, delivers 92 TFLOPs or higher.
But despite being impressed with these TFLOP estimates, I’m not entirely surprised. If the next generation card really ends up drawing 600W, if not much more, then I would expect them to offer a power boost that is worth such a leap. The direct performance is fine, but performance per. watts means something. Admittedly, most of these leaks refer to the high-end RDNA3 and AD102 GPUs. We have almost no information about the smaller GPUs in the range. They are just as important to the wider market, if not more so, as they are the ones selling in volume. They certainly will not use as much power.
The next GPU battle is set to be an epic battle. Hopefully, all of these TFLOPs will translate into higher gaming performance.