There’s a saying from the days of DOS: Wait for the point release, or the inevitable first service pack. That was about software, but there’s a corollary for PC hardware: Skip the first generation of any radically new hardware, or don’t set your hopes too high. Turing was Gen1 ray tracing. Ampere is Gen2, and it’s looking like an absolute beast.
Nvidia has doubled just about everything. Let’s start with transistor counts. The TU102 GPU found in the RTX 2080 Ti had a then-impressive 18.6 billion transistors (via TSMC 12FFC 12nm). GA102, which is used in both the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, tips the scales at 28 billion transistors, fabricated on an optimized Samsung 8N 8nm process. Yeah, it’s not quite double, but it’s a much bigger jump than the 50% increase from GP102’s 12 billion. More important is how you use those transistors.