NVIDIA registers the marks “3080”, “4080” and “5080”

The green giant has recorded in the European Union Intellectual Property Office the marks “3080”, “4080” and “5080”, a movement with which NVIDIA confirms the scheme you plan to follow with its next generation of graphics cards.

Unfortunately, these numbers have not been accompanied by any additional or distinctive data, although we can assume that NVIDIA will use the initials “RTX” which, as we know, have almost completely displaced the acronym «GTX», due to the implementation of hardware accelerated ray tracing.

That said, I put you in a situation, this is how those nomenclatures would be grouped:

• NVIDIA RTX 3080: Based on the Ampere architecture, manufactured in the 7nm process (rumored to be 8nm), it will bring significant improvements in efficiency and performance with ray tracing. Its arrival is expected in September, and it will be one of the great standard bearers of the RTX 30 series.
• NVIDIA RTX 4080: This graphics card will be based on Hopper, an architecture that, according to the latest information, will use the 5nm manufacturing process. The information we have is very scarce, for obvious reasons, but it is said that it could be the first graphic generation of NVIDIA with an MCM (multi-chip module) design and that NVIDIA will continue to focus its efforts on improving ray tracing performance. It is most likely to occur between 2021 and 2022.
• NVIDIA RTX 5080: We do not have information on this generation, but it should be an evolution of the previous one that will maintain, in principle, the manufacturing process at 5 nm. Its presentation should take place between 2023 and 2024.

NVIDIA and the evolution of the graphic sector after PS4 and Xbox One

With the arrival of PS4 and Xbox One, and the leap of both consoles to a PC-like architecture, the graphics card industry has experienced a difficult stage. Stagnation of developments in console, Mainly motivated by their long life, it gave rise to a marked stagnation in gaming requirements, and minimal innovation, two keys that have only been “broken” on very specific occasions.

Everyone who bought a Radeon HD 7970 or a GTX 680 in 2012 You can continue to play almost any current 1080p title perfectly with 30 stable FPS by adjusting the graphics quality, although the former has aged considerably better than the latter. We are talking about 8-year-old graphics cards, almost nothing.

That situation led NVIDIA to look for new ways to differentiate PC gaming, and the solution came through ray tracing, a promising technology that, unfortunately, was also greatly affected by the issue of console-centric developments. Since the arrival of the RTX 20 series in late 2018, we have only seen the debut of a few games with this technology, a reality that will finally begin to change with the arrival of the new generation consoles, which will have acceleration of the layout. hardware lightning.

The new NVIDIA graphics cards will continue to improve in raw power, will have more graphics memory and offer superior efficiency, but I think the green giant will increasingly bet on enhancing the ray tracing and smart rescaling (DLSS).