TECH TALK
Nvidia’s Ampere Doubles Everything
IT’S BEEN TWO YEARS since Nvidia launched a new graphics architecture. The previous Turing GPUs ushered in the era of ray tracing for games- which, let’s be honest, has mostly underwhelmed. With the next-gen consoles also adding ray-tracing hardware, however, we expect things to pick up in that arena. Ampere aims to “fix” what went wrong with Turing, mostly by throwing more hardware and performance at the problem.
Jarred Walton
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.