Possible NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti sample hits 3DMark Time Spy

A possible Ampere RTX benchmark result has been posted on 3DMark. Spotted and brought to our attention by @_rogame, the listing follows the publication of rumoured Ampere GPU specifications and hands-on pictures on which we have already reported. The 3DMark listing does not reveal the name of the Ampere GPU that has been benchmarked, but HardwareLeaks has offered some performance comparisons between it and some current-generation NVIDIA GPUs.

We would not read too much into the clock speeds that 3DMark has reported, though. As HardwareLeaks and Videocardz note, a memory clock of 6 GHz does not make sense for a premium desktop GPU. Hence, this value may have been improperly detected by 3DMark, or improperly reported by early drivers. Likewise, the benchmark states that the GPU has a 1,935 MHz boost clock. HardwareLeaks posits that final clock speeds could be much higher than this and that a boost clock of 1,935 MHz may only be true of engineering samples.

Nonetheless, the NVIDIA Ampere GPU scored 18,257 in 3DMark Time Spy Graphics. As HardwareLeaks has summarised in the table below, this puts the GPU 30.98% ahead of the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition and 22.14% beyond the NVIDIA TITAN RTX. A score this high seems to suggest that the mystery GPU is the successor to the RTX 2080 Ti, which may well be called the RTX 3080 Ti. According to multiple sources, NVIDIA has three Ampere cards in development, all of which the company has built on its GA102 GPU. These could feature anywhere up to 5,376 CUDA cores and 24 GB of VRAM.

AMD and NVIDIA are thought to be launching their next-generation consumer GPUs in September. The latter's Ampere architecture will do battle with what has come to be known as Big Navi, which AMD may market as the RX 6000 series.