Nvidia shares additional RTX 3000 info in Community Q&A

[FaxedForward]

Nvidia did a community Q&A on Reddit where they allowed user questions on RTX 3000 and then posted their answers the following day. The entire conversation is now available on their website (link at bottom of post). Some of this is stuff we already know, but a good chunk of it is new.

 

Quote

Following the unveiling of our new GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, we hosted a community Q&A on r/NVIDIA and invited eight of our top NVIDIA subject matter experts to answer your questions. While we could not answer all questions, we found the most common ones and our experts responded.

 

GeForce RTX 30-Series

Q: Why only 10 GB of memory for RTX 3080? How was that determined to be a sufficient number, when it is stagnant from the previous generation?

We’re constantly analyzing memory requirements of the latest games and regularly review with game developers to understand their memory needs for current and upcoming games. The goal of 3080 is to give you great performance at up to 4k resolution with all the settings maxed out at the best possible price. In order to do this, you need a very powerful GPU with high speed memory and enough memory to meet the needs of the games. A few examples - if you look at Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Metro Exodus, Wolfenstein Youngblood, Gears of War 5, Borderlands 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 running on a 3080 at 4k with Max settings (including any applicable high res texture packs) and RTX On, when the game supports it, you get in the range of 60-100fps and use anywhere from 4GB to 6GB of memory. Extra memory is always nice to have but it would increase the price of the graphics card, so we need to find the right balance.

 

Q: When the slide says RTX 3070 is equal or faster than 2080 Ti, are we talking about traditional rasterization or DLSS/RT workloads? Very important if you could clear it up, since no traditional rasterization benchmarks were shown, only RT/DLSS supporting games.

We are talking about both. Games that only support traditional rasterization and games that support RTX (RT+DLSS). 

 

Q: Does Ampere support HDMI 2.1 with the full 48Gbps bandwidth?

Yes. The NVIDIA Ampere Architecture supports the highest HDMI 2.1 link rate of 12Gbs/lane across all 4 lanes, and supports Display Stream Compression (DSC) to be able to power up to 8K, 60Hz in HDR.

 

Q: Could you elaborate a little on this doubling of CUDA cores? How does it affect the general architectures of the GPCs? How much of a challenge is it to keep all those FP32 units fed? What was done to ensure high occupancy?

One of the key design goals for the Ampere 30-series SM was to achieve twice the throughput for FP32 operations compared to the Turing SM. To accomplish this goal, the Ampere SM includes new datapath designs for FP32 and INT32 operations. One datapath in each partition consists of 16 FP32 CUDA Cores capable of executing 16 FP32 operations per clock. Another datapath consists of both 16 FP32 CUDA Cores and 16 INT32 Cores. As a result of this new design, each Ampere SM partition is capable of executing either 32 FP32 operations per clock, or 16 FP32 and 16 INT32 operations per clock. All four SM partitions combined can execute 128 FP32 operations per clock, which is double the FP32 rate of the Turing SM, or 64 FP32 and 64 INT32 operations per clock.

Doubling the processing speed for FP32 improves performance for a number of common graphics and compute operations and algorithms. Modern shader workloads typically have a mixture of FP32 arithmetic instructions such as FFMA, floating point additions (FADD), or floating point multiplications (FMUL), combined with simpler instructions such as integer adds for addressing and fetching data, floating point compare, or min/max for processing results, etc. Performance gains will vary at the shader and application level depending on the mix of instructions. Ray tracing denoising shaders are good examples that might benefit greatly from doubling FP32 throughput.

Doubling math throughput required doubling the data paths supporting it, which is why the Ampere SM also doubled the shared memory and L1 cache performance for the SM. (128 bytes/clock per Ampere SM versus 64 bytes/clock in Turing). Total L1 bandwidth for GeForce RTX 3080 is 219 GB/sec versus 116 GB/sec for GeForce RTX 2080 Super.

Like prior NVIDIA GPUs, Ampere is composed of Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), Raster Operators (ROPS), and memory controllers.

The GPC is the dominant high-level hardware block with all of the key graphics processing units residing inside the GPC. Each GPC includes a dedicated Raster Engine, and now also includes two ROP partitions (each partition containing eight ROP units), which is a new feature for NVIDIA Ampere Architecture GA10x GPUs. More details on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture can be found in NVIDIA’s Ampere Architecture White Paper, which will be published in the coming days.

 

Q: Any idea if the dual airflow design is going to be messed up for inverted cases? More than previous designs? Seems like it would blow it down on the cpu. But the CPU cooler would still blow it out the case. Maybe it’s not so bad.

Q: Second question. 10x quieter than the Titan for the 3090 is more or less quieter than a 2080 Super (Evga ultra fx for example)?

The new flow through cooling design will work great as long as chassis fans are configured to bring fresh air to the GPU, and then move the air that flows through the GPU out of the chassis. It does not matter if the chassis is inverted.

The Founders Edition RTX 3090 is quieter than both the Titan RTX and the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Super. We haven’t tested it against specific partner designs, but I think you’ll be impressed with what you hear… or rather, don’t hear.

 

Q: Will the 30 series cards be supporting 10bit 444 120fps? Traditionally Nvidia consumer cards have only supported 8bit or 12bit output, and don’t do 10bit. The vast majority of hdr monitors/TVs on the market are 10bit.

The 30 series supports 10bit HDR. In fact, HDMI 2.1 can support up to 8K@60Hz with 12bit HDR, and that covers 10bit HDR displays.

 

Q: What breakthrough in tech let you guys massively jump to the 3xxx line from the 2xxx line? I knew it would be scary, but it's insane to think about how much more efficient and powerful these cards are. Can these cards handle 4k 144hz?

There were major breakthroughs in GPU architecture, process technology and memory technology to name just a few. An RTX 3080 is powerful enough to run certain games maxed out at 4k 144fps - Doom Eternal, Forza 4, Wolfenstein Youngblood to name a few. But others - Red Dead Redemption 2, Control, Borderlands 3 for example are closer to 4k 60fps with maxed out settings.

 

RTX IO

Q: Could we see RTX IO coming to machine learning libraries such as Pytorch? This would be great for performance in real-time applications.

NVIDIA delivered high-speed I/O solutions for a variety of data analytics platforms roughly a year ago with NVIDIA GPU DirectStorage. It provides for high-speed I/O between the GPU and storage, specifically for AI and HPC type applications and workloads. For more information please check out: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpudirect-storage/

 

Q: Does RTX IO allow use of SSD space as VRAM? Or am I completely misunderstanding?

RTX IO allows reading data from SSD’s at much higher speed than traditional methods, and allows the data to be stored and read in a compressed format by the GPU, for decompression and use by the GPU. It does not allow the SSD to replace frame buffer memory, but

it allows the data from the SSD to get to the GPU, and GPU memory much faster, with much less CPU overhead.

 

Q: Will there be a certain ssd speed requirement for RTX I/O?

There is no SSD speed requirement for RTX IO, but obviously, faster SSD’s such as the latest generation of Gen4 NVMe SSD’s will produce better results, meaning faster load times, and the ability for games to stream more data into the world dynamically. Some games may have minimum requirements for SSD performance in the future, but those would be determined by the game developers. RTX IO will accelerate SSD performance regardless of how fast it is, by reducing the CPU load required for I/O, and by enabling GPU-based decompression, allowing game assets to be stored in a compressed format and offloading potentially dozens of CPU cores from doing that work. Compression ratios are typically 2:1, so that would effectively amplify the read performance of any SSD by 2x.

 

Q: Will the new GPUs and RTX IO work on Windows 7/8.1?

RTX 30-series GPUs are supported on Windows 7 and Windows 10, RTX IO is supported on Windows 10.

 

Q: I am excited for the RTX I/O feature but I partially don't get how exactly it works? Let's say I have a NVMe SSD, a 3070 and the latest Nvidia drivers, do I just now have to wait for the windows update with the DirectStorage API to drop at some point next year and then I am done or is there more?

RTX IO and DirectStorage will require applications to support those features by incorporating the new API’s. Microsoft is targeting a developer preview of DirectStorage for Windows for game developers next year, and NVIDIA RTX gamers will be able to take advantage of RTX IO enhanced games as soon as they become available.

 

NVIDIA BROADCAST APP

Q: What is the scope of the "Nvidia Broadcast" program? Is it intended to replace current GFE/Shadowplay for local recordings too?

NVIDIA Broadcast is a universal plugin app that enhances your microphone, speakers and camera with AI features such as noise reduction, virtual background, and auto frame. You basically select your devices as input, decide what AI effect to apply to them, and then NVIDIA Broadcast exposes virtual devices in your system that you can use with popular livestream, video chat, or video conference apps.

NVIDIA Broadcast does not record or stream video and is not a replacement for GFE/Shadowplay.

 

Q: Will there be any improvements to the RTX encoder in the Ampere series cards, similar to what we saw for the Turing Release? I did see info on the Broadcast software, but I'm thinking more along the lines of improvements in overall image quality at same bitrate.

For RTX 30 Series, we decided to focus improvements on the video decode side of things and added AV1 decode support. On the encode side, RTX 30 Series has the same great encoder as our RTX 20 Series GPU. We have also recently updated our NVIDIA Encoder SDK. In the coming months, livestream applications will be updating to this new version of the SDK, unlocking new performance options for streamers.

 

Q: I would like to know more about the new NVENC -- were there any upgrades made to this technology in the 30 series? It seems to be the future of streaming, and for many it's the reason to buy nvidia card rather than any other.

The GeForce RTX 30 Series leverages the same great hardware encoder as the GeForce RTX 20 Series. We have also recently updated our Video Codec SDK to version 10.0. In the coming months, applications will be updating to this new version of the SDK, unlocking new performance options.

 

Q: Regarding AV1 decode, is that supported on 3xxx series cards other than the 3090? In fact can this question and u/dylan522p question on support level be merged into: What are the encode/decode features of Ampere and do these change based on which 3000 series card is bought?

All of the GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs that we announced today have the same encoding and decoding capabilities:

• They all feature the 7th Gen NVIDIA Encoder (the one that we released with the RTX 20 Series), which will use our newly released Video Codec SDK 10.0. This new SDK will be integrated in the coming months by the live streaming apps, unlocking new presets with more performance options.
• They all have the new 5th Gen NVIDIA Decoder, which enables AV1 hardware accelerated decode on GPU. AV1 consumes 50% less bandwidth and unlocks up to 8K HDR video playback without a big performance hit on your CPU.

 

NVIDIA OMNIVERSE MACHINIMA

Q: How active is the developer support for Machinima? As it's cloud based, I'm assuming that the developers/publishers have to be involved for it to really take off (at least indirectly through modding community support or directly with asset access). Alongside this, what is the benefit of having it cloud based, short of purely desktop?

We are actively working with game developers on support for Omniverse Machinima and will have more details to share along with public beta in October.

Omniverse Machinima can be run locally on a GeForce RTX desktop PC or in the cloud. The benefit of running Omniverse from the cloud is easier real-time collaboration across users.

 

NVIDIA STUDIO

Q: Content creator here. Will these cards be compatible with GPU renderers like Octane/Arnold/Redshift/etc from launch? I know with previous generations, a new CUDA version coincided with the launch and made the cards inert for rendering until the 3rd-party software patched it in, but I'm wondering if I will be able to use these on launch day using existing CUDA software.

A CUDA update will be needed for some renderers. We have been working closely with the major creative apps on these updates and expect the majority (hopefully all!) to be ready on the day these cards hit the shelves.

 

NVIDIA REFLEX

Q: Will Nvidia Reflex be a piece of hardware in new monitors or will it be a software that other nvidia gpus can use?

NVIDIA Reflex is both. The NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer is a revolutionary new addition to the G-SYNC Processor that enables end to end system latency measurement. Additionally, NVIDIA Reflex SDK is integrated into games and enables a Low Latency mode that can be used by GeForce GTX 900 GPUs and up to reduce system latency. Each of these features can be used independently.

 

Q: Is NVIDIA Reflex just a rebranding of NVIDIA’s Ultra Low Latency mode in the NVIDIA Control Panel?

No, NVIDIA Reflex is different. Ultra Low Latency mode is a control panel option, whereas NVIDIA Reflex gets integrated by a game developer directly into the game.  Through native game integration and enhanced algorithms, NVIDIA Reflex is much more effective in optimizing a game’s rendering pipeline for lowest latency.

 

 

See our Reflex article here to learn more: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/reflex-low-latency-platform/.

 

Q: The Ultra Low Latency mode supported CS:GO and Rainbow Six:Siege, why doesn’t NVIDIA Reflex?

Unlike the NVIDIA Ultra Low Latency mode, NVIDIA Reflex provides an SDK that the developers must integrate. Having our technology directly in the game engine allows us to align game simulation and render work in a way that streamlines latency.  We’ve currently announced support coming for top games including Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Destiny 2.  We look forward to adding as many titles as possible to our supported title list. 

 

Q: Does NVIDIA Reflex lower FPS performance to reduce latency?

The industry has long optimized for FPS, so much so that there have been massive latency trade-offs made to squeeze out every last 0.5% FPS improvement. NVIDIA Reflex takes a new look at optimizing the rendering pipeline for end to end system latency.  While our research shows that latency is the key metric for aim precision and reaction speed, we understand FPS is still an important metric; so NVIDIA Reflex aims to reduce latency while maintaining  FPS. In the majority of cases, Reflex can achieve latency reduction without any FPS impact.  In a few cases, gamers may see small 0-2% FPS impacts alongside larger latency gains -- a good tradeoff for competitive games.  Of course, Reflex is a setting in-game, so gamers can choose for themselves.  Based on our testing though, we believe you’ll find little reason to ever play with it off. 

 

PCIE GEN4

Q: Will customers find a performance degradation on PCIE 3.0?

System performance is impacted by many factors and the impact varies between applications. The impact is typically less than a few percent going from a x16 PCIE 4.0 to x16 PCIE 3.0. CPU selection often has a larger impact on performance. We look forward to new platforms that can fully take advantage of Gen4 capabilities for potential performance increases. Note also, all benchmarks and performance data on our website and presented by Jensen was from a PCIE 3.0 platform.

 

Disappointing that some features like RTX IO won't even be entering developer preview status until mid-2021, but what can ya do.

 

Sources

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-community-qa/

[zeusthemoose]

I haven’t gone through all of them, but the one that seems most important to me is the last one about pcie 3.0 vs 4.0. If I’m not mistaken, they used a 10900k (which is the fastest gaming cpu). That means that even if pcie 4.0 has an effect on performance, it is not a big enough one that it is worth using a technically worse gaming cpu.

[rawrdaysgoby]

Wow did Nvda just killed off Hard drive permanently for regular consumers that only game.

[Sarra]

2 hours ago, rawrdaysgoby said:

Wow did Nvda just killed off Hard drive permanently for regular consumers that only game.

I thought Seagate did that already...

[RejZoR]

Good to hear clarification of the RTX IO. I was under impression NVMe was a requirement, but it seems even SATA SSD's can benefit from it. And since decompression is always a linear, sequential thing, getting up to 550MB/s isn't bad and is like 5x the HDD speed. And if you use high compression, it's unlikely you'll be actually decompressing at those speeds anyways. Unless GPU's can do that. In which case I wonder why file archivers haven't gone and used GPU's for that yet...

[elfensky]

 

[X-System]

1 hour ago, elfensky said:

-snip-

And another one

 

 

[ShinRamen]

It‘d be interesting to see a comparison of Ampere with a 10900k + SSD @ PCIe 3.0 and a 3900/3950X + SSD 4.0 @PCIe 4.0 in different workloads - to not only determine the difference in PCIe 4.0 for the GPU alone but also the SSD for RTX IO. 

[RejZoR]

@X-System

I always admire and respect the honesty of this NVIDIA engineer

[jasonvp]

43 minutes ago, ShinRamen said:

to not only determine the difference in PCIe 4.0 for the GPU alone but also the SSD for RTX IO. 

Purely ignoring RTX IO, PCI-E 4.0 will have zero performance benefits for a GPU used in gaming.  Absolutely none.  A PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot has 128Gbits/sec of throughput available to it.  An 8K/60FPS game will, at most, take up about 65Gbits/sec of that.  Or, just over half.

 

Where PCI-E 4.0 might come into play (again, ignoring RTX IO) is heavy compute work loads.  If the CPU can shovel stuff off to the GPU fast enough to saturate a 3.0 bus, 4.0 will certainly give it twice the breathing room.  But again, that won't happen with a game.  Any game.  At any resolution you or I are playing at.

 

 

[ShinRamen]

4 hours ago, jasonvp said:

Purely ignoring RTX IO, PCI-E 4.0 will have zero performance benefits for a GPU used in gaming.  Absolutely none.  A PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot has 128Gbits/sec of throughput available to it.  An 8K/60FPS game will, at most, take up about 65Gbits/sec of that.  Or, just over half.

 

Where PCI-E 4.0 might come into play (again, ignoring RTX IO) is heavy compute work loads.  If the CPU can shovel stuff off to the GPU fast enough to saturate a 3.0 bus, 4.0 will certainly give it twice the breathing room.  But again, that won't happen with a game.  Any game.  At any resolution you or I are playing at.

 

 

Well, yes - I agree. For pure GPU gaming performance there won‘t be much of a difference between 3.0 and 4.0. what I‘m interested in is heavier workloads that can leverage the RTX IO features. 

[BabaGanuche]

4 hours ago, jasonvp said:

Purely ignoring RTX IO, PCI-E 4.0 will have zero performance benefits for a GPU used in gaming.  Absolutely none.  A PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot has 128Gbits/sec of throughput available to it.  An 8K/60FPS game will, at most, take up about 65Gbits/sec of that.  Or, just over half.

 

Where PCI-E 4.0 might come into play (again, ignoring RTX IO) is heavy compute work loads.  If the CPU can shovel stuff off to the GPU fast enough to saturate a 3.0 bus, 4.0 will certainly give it twice the breathing room.  But again, that won't happen with a game.  Any game.  At any resolution you or I are playing at.

 

 

This is not true with the current cards (5700XT) there are games where there is a difference between 4.0 and 3.0. Steve at Hardware Unboxed did some testing and there was not zero difference. If you had said a difference that matters I would have agreed with you as I do not think 165 vs 162 or 137 vs 133 FPS matters. Having said all of that that was with a card with significantly less performance than the 3080 and 3090, where it would be more likely to matter. And from the test 4.0 vs 3.0 appears to matter more at higher frame rates.

 

 

 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

5 hours ago, ShinRamen said:

It‘d be interesting to see a comparison of Ampere with a 10900k + SSD @ PCIe 3.0 and a 3900/3950X + SSD 4.0 @PCIe 4.0 in different workloads - to not only determine the difference in PCIe 4.0 for the GPU alone but also the SSD for RTX IO. 

do a 3700x or a 3800x/xt. All 3 game better than the 3900 or 3950x.

[rushboarduk]

I think the 3080 will be worth the wait, or even the 3090 if you've been hoping for the TITAN RTX (which is now slower) to drop in price.  The variants from AORUS, in particular, have a nice display which shows fan speeds and GPU temps.

[straight_stewie]

11 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Unless GPU's can do that. In which case I wonder why file archivers haven't gone and used GPU's for that yet...

"RTX I/O" is just Nvidias name for their hardware/software that supports Microsofts DirectX DirectStorage API (kind of like how RTX is Nvidias name for their support of Microsofts DirectX DXR API).

In other words, doing that decompression requires at least OS support, and since they aren't saying it will be backported to older GPUs, likely hardware support as well.

Personally, I'm expecting many more improvements like these in coming generations. In the famous DirectX "Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling" blog post, Microsoft said:

Quote

The goal of the first phase of hardware accelerated GPU scheduling is to modernize a fundamental pillar of the graphics subsystem and to set the stage for things to come… but that’s going to be a story for a another time .

 

[RejZoR]

32 minutes ago, straight_stewie said:

"RTX I/O" is just Nvidias name for their hardware/software that supports Microsofts DirectX DirectStorage API (kind of like how RTX is Nvidias name for their support of Microsofts DirectX DXR API).

In other words, doing that decompression requires at least OS support, and since they aren't saying it will be backported to older GPUs, likely hardware support as well.

Personally, I'm expecting many more improvements like these in coming generations. In the famous DirectX "Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling" blog post, Microsoft said:

 

I initially thought it has to be PCie which is more directly connected to the CPU.

[Nayr438]

7 hours ago, ShinRamen said:

It‘d be interesting to see a comparison of Ampere with a 10900k + SSD @ PCIe 3.0 and a 3900/3950X + SSD 4.0 @PCIe 4.0 in different workloads - to not only determine the difference in PCIe 4.0 for the GPU alone but also the SSD for RTX IO. 

It still wouldn't be a direct comparison between PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 because you would be comparing Intel and AMD as well, where there will always be a difference.

You would need the comparison to happen with the exact same CPU.

[spartaman64]

46 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

It still wouldn't be a direct comparison between PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 because you would be comparing Intel and AMD as well, where there will always be a difference.

You would need the comparison to happen with the exact same CPU.

i mean you can compare with a x570 motherboard and then a x470 motherboard or something

[BabaGanuche]

42 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

i mean you can compare with a x570 motherboard and then a x470 motherboard or something

You can also just set it to use 3.0 in BIOS on x570

[bcredeur97]

PCIe 4.0 prob makes a bigger difference when used alongside RTX IO I bet.

[porina]

Apparently an architecture NDA has lifted. I've not looked or seen anything following from that yet, but Anandtech are expecting to post something US evening. 

 

 

[Craftyawesome]

8 hours ago, straight_stewie said:

In other words, doing that decompression requires at least OS support, and since they aren't saying it will be backported to older GPUs, likely hardware support as well.

FWIW, RTX IO is apparently going to be on turing too.

[straight_stewie]

1 hour ago, Craftyawesome said:

FWIW, RTX IO is apparently going to be on turing too.

It's possible that Turing has the necessary hardware.

From the looks of things, and little allusions all around (more like what I previously mentioned), it seems like there is some plan that Microsoft has to start optimizing the graphics subsystem. It's likely that these things have been "in the works" for a while.

Regardless, Pascal came out when NVMe was starting to become popular, and it was PCIe 3 as well, and they've made no mention of support for DirectStorage on those devices. I'm hedging my bets on it requiring hardware support.

[Mark Kaine]

If games use that little VRAM it's because devs need to work around what people have (which realistically is around 4GB)

 

Games would look much better if devs had more VRAM as a target...

Of course NV knows this but I thought I'd throw it in there. 

[AlwaysFSX]

5 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

If games use that little VRAM it's because devs need to work around what people have (which realistically is around 4GB)

 

Games would look much better if devs had more VRAM as a target...

Of course NV knows this but I thought I'd throw it in there. 

Eh, that'd be diminishing returns. Games used to be far smaller until large(r) hard drives became available, now they're ballooning for little to no benefit.