Nvidia Reveals The Heart Of Its Next-Gen Gaming Hardware, Ampere

Nvidia's GTC 2020 keynote was delivered from the kitchen of CEO Jensen Huang, but the scaled-back presentation didn't mean the content was lacking. Although Nvidia has yet to reveal its new gaming-focused GPUs, it did focus on what will power them.

Ampere is the latest Nvidia processing architecture that will move from 12nm down to 7nm, akin to the jump AMD performed with its RX 5000 line of GPUs. The shift should theoretically bring with it a jump in performance, as Nvidia can now fit more transistors onto the processor. Ampere's A100 system board already has 54 billion transistors on it, making it the largest 7nm processor in production.

Nvidia didn't go into detail about what that means for gaming specifically, or if the A100 board would be used as-is in its next-generation cards. But it did announce an update to the AI-processing Tensor cores on its current Turning -powered RTX GPUs. These third-generation Tensor cores streamline AI computations, which should theoretically mean better DLSS 2.0 performance and ray-tracing in the near future.

Nvidia even provided a demo of the advancements the company is making with both technologies, showcased in a new ray-traced game that edges closer to photorealism.

It's suspected that Nvidia will announce new gaming hardware later in the year, and presumably launch it sooner afterwards. With the reveal of Unreal Engine 5 and advancements in computationally taxing effects like ray-tracing, more powerful hardware will be welcome.