Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 and the potential GeForce RTX 3090 are set to get a serious boost in ray-tracing performance thanks to a rumored dual-sided design.
A video by Coreteks detailed how the next-generation GeForce graphics card based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture will have the main GPU on one side of the printed circuit board (PCB) and a co-processor on the other side. That co-processor will supposedly be dedicated to powering ray-tracing rendering, building upon the dedicated ray-tracing cores the current GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards have.
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There’s very little to back up this rumor, though Coreteks has a proven to be a reliable tech tipster in the past. But we’d still suggest you take this alleged information with a degree of skepticism, because so far the leaked images of the GeForce RTX 3080 don’t necessarily show a graphics card with a dual-sided PCB.
But WCCFtech pointed out that Nvidia has patented traversal co-processors to aid in ray-tracing back in 2018. So there’s a case for the next GeForce series of graphics cards to come with co-processors, which would do the job of ray-tracing cores while avoiding the need to fit them all into the GPUs die.
All of this should translate into better ray-tracing performance for Nvidia’s next-generation GeForce graphics cards. Such a boost in performance is to be expected, but a hike in ray-tracing performance could be significant for the gaming world.
That’s because the PS5 and Xbox Series X are coming with ray-tracing support to usher in games with much more realistic lighting that can transform the look of a game. Consoles with ray-tracing capabilities give developers a larger audience that can support the advanced rendering technique.
As a result, that’s likely to mean more games with ray-tracing; how those will run on PS5 and Xbox Series X hardware has yet to be seen. But if the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 greatly boost ray-tracing performance, it could make running such titles at very high resolutions and at high frame rates a distinct possibility for PC gamers.
We still don't have any official info on the RTX 3080, but Nvidia is rumored to unveil its new GPU as soon as August. And with AMD expected to release a powerful graphics card to take on Nvidia’s best GPUs around September time, the second half of the year is set to be equally interesting for PC gamers as it is for Xbox and PlayStation fans.
