Yuanta Securities predicts Nvidia Ampere will be 50 percent faster than Turing while consuming 50 percent less power

It's been nearly a year since the arrival of Nvidia's Turing line of graphics cards. First-gen Turing offered disappointing performance gains over Pascal, offset only partially by the presence of hardware ray-tracing. The Super series refresh pushed performance up 10-15 percent at nearly every price bracket. Still, the Turing line represents a low point for Nvidia with regards to price and absolute performance.

A report by Taiwanese investment securities consultancy Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting, accessed by the Taipei Times, seemingly indicates that Nvidia's next-gen Ampere architecture will provide the performance leap consumers have been looking for. The report predicts a Q2 2020 release for the Ampere line. Ampere is set to be Nvidia's first GPU lineup built on the 7nm process.

According to Yuanta's report, the new GPU architecture will enable Nvidia to offer 50 percent more performance with 50 percent less power consumption. While these numbers are remarkable, it remains to be seen whether Nvidia will push for higher absolute performance or ship smaller, cheaper to manufacture GPUs that perform slightly better than their Turing counterparts.

Yuanta stated that Ampere's launch would benefit MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus the most. MSI reportedly generates 60 percent of its income from gaming while Gigabyte and Asus derive 30 percent of their revenues from the segment.

The report leaves important questions unanswered, though: will Ampere offer better hardware ray-tracing support? And, more importantly, how will it compete with AMD's upcoming second-gen Navi parts?