A leaked image posted on the Chinese technology forum ChipHell reveals what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 looks like. And it's a bit of an ugly beast.
The GeForce RTX 3080, which will be Nvidia's next top-of-the-line graphics card based on the new Ampere architecture, will easily crush not only Nvidia's current graphics card lineup but also the PS5 and Xbox Series X It is expected to have the graphics power to do just that. And to protect that power from GPU burnout, a large cooling system will be required. Let's just hope it's nothing like the leaked images.
The dual fans marked RTX 3080 are surrounded by a cross-like design that resembles the outline of an hourglass. There are also a large number of heatsink fins throughout the body of the card, which may very well keep it cool, but looks more like something found in an industrial air conditioning system rather than the heart of a gaming PC.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some PC gamers may not care about the aesthetics of their hardware. However, many gamers prefer cases with transparent side panels to look into their PCs, so the RTX 3080 may turn away gamers who want something elegant to show off in their beastly builds.
But it may simply be an engineering sample, lacking a final shroud. With the right shroud, the ugly but necessary parts of the graphics card could be hidden from view. It could also be that it is not a reference or Founder's Edition GPU from Nvidia itself, but an early card from a partner brand such as Asus or MSI that is based on an Nvidia card.
As it stands, we don't know much about the next wave of GeForce graphics cards. We expect not only better performance, especially at 4K resolutions, but also better ray tracing performance; the first batch of RTX GPUs introduced dedicated ray tracing hardware, and Nivida is expected to build on that.
But this is not the only Nvidia leak: a hardware leaker calling himself Kopite7kimi has not only been working on a GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card to spearhead the next generation of Nvidia GPUs, but also a new GeForce Titan card He tweeted that it is possible.
Nvidia has not released a Titan card, the very pinnacle of consumer GeForce performance, for some time, so there will undoubtedly be a successor. But take this leak with a grain of salt, as not only does it break Nvidia's established naming convention, but the tweet also does not list a source: Nvidia has been working on the next generation of GPUs, like the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti flagship graphics cards, and then perhaps follow it up with a supercharged GPU once the Ampere architecture matures a bit.
Nevertheless, leaks like this indicate that a new Ampere GeForce RTX graphics card is on the way, which is convenient given that AMD plans to have a GeForce-killing graphics card ready around winter. Also, if both AMD and Nvidia announce new graphics cards before the end of the year, it will take attention away from the PS5 and Xbox Series X, which are scheduled to be released during the holiday season.
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