NVIDIA may be working on a new RTX 3050 A laptop GPU using an AD106 (Ada Lovelace) die, moving away from the Ampere chips used in other RTX 30-series GPUs. While not officially announced, the GPU is included in NVIDIA's latest driver release and the PCI ID database as GeForce RTX 3050 A Laptop GPU. The AD106 die choice is notable, as it has more transistors and CUDA cores than the GA107 in current RTX 3050s and the AD107 in RTX 4050 laptops. The AD106, used in RTX 4060 Ti desktop and RTX 4070 laptop GPUs, boasts 22.9 billion transistors and 4,608 CUDA cores, compared to GA107's 8.7 billion transistors and 2,560 CUDA cores, and AD107's 18.9 billion transistors and 3,072 CUDA cores.

While this could potentially improve performance, it's likely that NVIDIA will use a cut-down version of the AD106 chip for the RTX 3050 A. The exact specifications and features, such as support for DLSS 3, remain unknown. The use of TSMC's 4N node in AD106, instead of Samsung's 8N node used in Ampere, could potentially improve power efficiency and battery life. The performance of the RTX 3050 A compared to existing RTX 3050 and RTX 4050 laptops remains to be seen, however, the RTX 3050 A will likely perform similarly to existing Ampere-based parts as NVIDIA tends to use similar names for comparable performance levels. It's unclear if NVIDIA will bring this GPU to market, but adding new SKUs late in a product's lifespan isn't unprecedented.

February saw community mods bring resizable BAR support to several older platforms; and now we come across a mod that brings it to some older GPUs. The NVStrapsReBAR mod by terminatorul, which is forked out of the ReBarUEFI mod by xCurio, brings resizable BAR support to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series GPUs based on the "Turing" graphics architecture. This mod is intended for power users, and can potentially brick your motherboard. NVIDIA officially implemented resizable BAR support since its RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs in response to AMD's Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 GPUs implementing the tech under the marketing name Smart Access Memory. While AMD would go on to retroactively enable the tech for even the older RX 5000 series RDNA GPUs, NVIDIA didn't do so for "Turing."

NVStrapsReBAR is a motherboard UEFI firmware mod. It modifies the way your system firmware negotiates BAR size with the GPU on boot. There are only two ways to go about modding a platform to enable resizable BAR on an unsupported platform—by modding the motherboard firmware, or the video BIOS. Signature checks by security processors in NVIDIA GPUs make the video BIOS modding route impossible for most users; thankfully motherboard firmware modding isn't as difficult. There is an extensive documentation by the author to go about using this mod. The author has tested the mod to work with "Turing" GPUs, however, it doesn't work with older NVIDIA GPUs, including "Pascal." Resizable BAR enables the CPU (software) to see video memory as a single contiguously addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures.

NVIDIA today announced the important milestone of 500 games and apps that take advantage of NVIDIA RTX, the transformative set of gaming graphics technologies, that among many other things, mainstreamed real-time ray tracing in the consumer gaming space, and debuted the most profound gaming technology of recent times—DLSS, or performance uplifts through high-quality upscaling technologies. The company got to this milestone over a 5-year period, with RTX seeing the light of the day in August 2018. NVIDIA RTX is the combined feature-set of real time ray tracing, including NVIDIA-specific enhancements; and DLSS.

Although it started out as an upscaling-based performance enhancement that leverages AI, DLSS encompasses a whole suite of technologies aimed at enhancing performance at minimal quality loss, and in some cases even enhances the image quality over native resolution. This includes super resolution, or the classic DLSS and DLSS 2 feature set; DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which nearly doubles frame-rates by generating entire alternate frames entirely using AI, without involving the graphics rendering machinery; and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, which attempts to vastly improve the fidelity of ray traced elements in upscaled scenarios.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 537.42 WHQL Game Ready drivers. These introduce support for the new DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction technology, which will work on all GeForce RTX GPUs, including RTX 20-series "Turing," RTX 30-series "Ampere," and the latest RTX 40-series "Ada." Ray Reconstruction is a data-driven DNN-based ray tracing denoiser that produces superior results than hand-tuned legacy denoisers. In particular, ray traced elements such as shadows and reflections in games that use DLSS 2 (super resolution), should look more natural. The driver also comes with optimization for "Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty," besides "Warhaven," "Witchfire," and "Party Animals." The drivers also fix a couple of performance issues with Octane Renderer.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 537.42 WHQL

Be sure to check out our Performance and Image Comparison review of DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction later today, and our technical overview of how it works.

A recent report published by BoardChannels points to Galax possibly implementing a broad set of price cuts across its range of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and 30-series custom graphics card models. Insider information originating from sources within a pool of NVIDIA and AMD board partners suggests that Galax could be shaving off up to 1000 RMB (around $140) from certain Ampere and Ada Lovelace products - effective later this month in its native Hong Kong market as well as mainland China.

The article posits that GeForce RTX 4080 cards could end up becoming 1000 RMB cheaper, and popular RTX 3060 models receiving cuts of around 250 RMB (≈$35). Galax is reported to have already offered entry-level desktop GeForce RTX 3050 cards at lower prices in the latter half of May - with 140 RMB (≈$19.50) reductions. The RTX 4070 series is supposedly set to receive a measly discount of around 150 to 200 RMB (≈$21 to $28), which is likely not doing it many favors given slow worldwide uptake since the product range's launch in mid-April. Galax could be making adjustments to fall in line with rivals (in the region) who have already reduced asking prices for NVIDIA gaming hardware.

Paradox Interactive states: "To my fellow Godir. First off, we want to thank you for the awesome release! It's been amazing seeing so many of you finally getting your hands on the game. Many of you have been able to enjoy the game as we intended but there have been difficulties along the way. Over the past few days we've been hard at work to address the most common issues that have popped up. The people on the Hotfix branch have been incredibly helpful in tracking down the Graphics Driver issues and we're now confident in rolling out the fixes at large."

For users with the NVIDIA Graphics cards defined below, that have experienced frequent crashes, we have added a Driver Workaround setting. This setting will be automatically enabled for the affected users and should alleviate the most commonly experienced crashes. May your Pantheons Thrive

NVIDIA has released the latest iteration of its GeForce Game Ready drivers - Version 531.79 WHQL. This latest update provides optimizations for today's launch of Redfall - Arkane's horror adventure shooter features DLSS 3 technology - ensuring the best possible in-game performance on day one. This Game Ready Driver provides DLSS 2 technology support for a number of other launch titles including Showgunners and the upcoming Diablo IV Server Slam (May 12). Owners of RTX 30-series graphics cards have previously reported application crashes in Battlefield 2042, The Last of Us and the Unreal Editor - today's patch notes indicate that these issues have been fixed by the new update. Owners of Asus VG27WQ and Acer XV253Q monitors will be pleased to know that the highest available display refresh rate is now restored within NVIDIA's Control Panel app - the option was reported to have disappeared around version 531.41.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 531.79 WHQL

Two of NVIDIA's providers of Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) services are of the opinion that Team Green is happy to stay the course with its Ada Lovelace GPU production schedule. The backend providers Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) and King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) have not been given any new instructions with regard to shifts (up or down) in component assembly output. It is theorized that NVIDIA is aiming to clear any stock backlogs of graphics card models featuring previous generation architecture - namely the second gen GeForce RTX 30-series, built on Ampere.

The retail demand for the newly released GeForce RTX 4070 cards has been mild, to say the least - with plenty of inventory remaining on the shelves in the States. Critical reception of the midweight GeForce RTX GPU has also been middling - many have advised that budget conscience buyers should potentially look elsewhere. The market for discrete graphics card is in a fairly healthy state at the moment, with major production issues and fractured supply chains becoming lesser concerns for electronics manufacturers. NVIDIA has the advantage of being a market leader, and seems to be quite content with proceedings - but their analysts are very likely keeping an eye on the RTX 4070 sales figures. Its products are out and readily available - no need to change direction too sharply.

NVIDIA has removed all its GeForce RTX 30-series Founders Edition graphics cards from its webstore. There are still plenty of RTX 30-series graphics cards available everywhere, including the NVIDIA webstore, as NVIDIA is happily selling custom versions from its AIC partners. This does not mean that you can't find the RTX 30-series Founders Edition graphics cards at other shops, as some might be available from other retailers/e-tailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, Mindfactory, and others. It is now obvious that NVIDIA is slowly phasing out the Ampere-based graphics cards and that it will focus on GeForce RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 Ti, as well as the GeForce RTX 4070 that should come soon.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 526.47 WHQL adds support for two new GPUs, namely the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB, and the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X, the two SKUs NVIDIA launched to improve its standing against the RX 6650 XT, RX 6600, and Arc 7-series. Among the game optimizations with this release are for "Sackboy: A Big Adventure," "Victoria 3," "WRC Generations," and DLSS 3 frame-generation support in F1 22. Among the handful issues fixed with this release are game map corruption in "Cyberpunk 2077," a crash and reboot issue noticed with the Dell XPS 9560; lower performance noticed in Minecraft Java Edition; the 165 Hz refresh-rate option not being available with Samsung Odyssey Ark monitors; GeForce Experience selecting the wrong display-head with Shadowplay; and certain online video artifacting noticed with NVIDIA Image Scaling enabled.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 526.47 WHQL

NVIDIA's add-in board partners today began quietly launching the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB, a variant of the RTX 3060 with a third of its memory size and memory bus-width sawed off. The RTX 3060, NVIDIA's best-selling desktop graphics SKU from the RTX 30-series "Ampere," originally launched with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory bus, which at its reference speed of 15 Gbps (GDDR6-effective), makes 360 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The new variant comes with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a narrower 128-bit memory interface, with the same 15 Gbps data-rate, which works out to 240 GB/s memory bandwidth.

Besides memory size, bus-width, and bandwidth; NVIDIA hasn't tinkered with the core-configuration with the RTX 3060 8 GB. It still comes with 3,584 CUDA cores across 28 SM, which work out to 112 Tensor cores, 28 RT cores, 112 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The GPU's base frequency is set at 1320 MHz, and boost frequency at 1777 MHz—same as the original RTX 3060. Even the typical graphics power is unchanged, at 170 W. The new 8 GB variant doesn't replace the original, but is being positioned a notch below it, possibly to compete against the likes of the Radeon RX 6600 (non-XT), and perhaps even the Arc A750.

In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver's release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the username "Timbers007" rested that their card, which launched exclusively as LHR-enabled graphics cards (with no RTX 3080 Ti cards without LHR in circulation); is now achieving double its usual hashrates when benchmarked with ethminer. It's able to put out 112 MH/s, a hashrate only possible with mining software that circumvents the LHR limiter, such as NiceHash or NBMiner.

In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.

This is probably the only picture of a GeForce RTX 3090 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card. NVIDIA allegedly decided against this branding, in favor of the RTX 3090 Ti, to designate its maxed-out GA102-based graphics card. With no other "SUPER" SKUs in the RTX 30-series and plenty of "Ti," the company probably thought it wasn't worth the trouble to leave the odd SUPER SKU sticking out at the top. The picture surfaced on the NGA Forums, showing the card with prominent "RTX 3090 SUPER" branding etched along the top frame of the cooler. This card has the same device ID as the RTX 3090 Ti, so GPU-Z detects it as such. It also has identical specs to an RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition.

NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang, in his Q2 Fiscal-2023 Results call confirmed that the company's next-generation GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards could be revealed at GTC Fall 2022, to be held next month in September. NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 40-series "Ada" will be unlike those of the previous few generations, despite retaining a "top-down" launch cycle (of launching high-end SKUs first). CEO Jen Hsun says that the first products will be "layered on top" of the current-generation "Ampere" products, so they don't cannibalize the sales of current-generation products.

"Ampere is the most popular GPU we've ever created. It is in the top 15 most popular gaming GPUs on Steam. And it remains the best GPUs in the world, and it will be very successful for some time. However, we do have exciting new next-generation coming and it's going to be layered on top of that. And so, we've taken—we've done two things. We've reduced sell-in to let channel inventory correct and we've implemented programs with our partners to price position the products in the channel in preparation for our next generation," said CEO Jen Hsun Huang. This could mean that the RTX 40-series could see a ramp-up to the various mainstream market segments, and gain volumes from them, only in 2023. The remainder of 2022 could see a high-end debut of the RTX 40-series, selling alongside attractively priced RTX 30-series cards.Update 09:48 UTC: NVIDIA states that the CEO Keynote for GTC is scheduled for September 20.

NVIDIA is working with its board partners to introduce price-cuts for the higher-end of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, in addition to game bundles. This would see the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti drop in price from $1,999 to $1,499, a 25% price-cut. The RTX 3090 (non-Ti) sees its price cut from $1,499 down to $1,299, or a 13.3% cut. The RTX 3080 Ti slides from $1,199 down to $1,099, an 8.3% cut. The RTX 3080 12 GB will finally be available at or below its MSRP of $799, while remaining inventories of the original RTX 3080 10 GB sticks to $699.

In addition to these price-cuts, NVIDIA is bundling "Ghostwire Tokyo" and "DOOM Eternal" Year One Pass (base game + two DLCs), with these cards as part of a game bundle. NVIDIA is competing with not just a sudden drop in demand stemming from the crypto-currency mining crash; but also crypto miners flooding the market with used cards.

ASUS has announced that it will be dropping the prices for almost the entirety of its NVIDIA RTX 30-series graphics card stack. The news comes on the back of finally descending channel prices for the latest GPUs, alongside the U.S. Trade Office decision last week of excluding integrated circuit boards from the added taxes in the China-US Trade War. As an ASUS representative told Tom's Hardware, users should expect an "up to 25%" price reduction to be applied throughout its RTX 30-series stack (from the RTX 3050 through the RTX 3090 Ti). Interestingly, there was no mention of AMD's graphics cards in the announcement.

After more than a year of inflated pricing, there may be a light in the tunnel - although it's becoming increasingly difficult to discern whether it's the RTX 3000-series family behind the veil or NVIDIA's next-gen solutions. No other AMD or NVIDIA board partner made a comparable announcement, but one would expect them to follow ASUS on the downward pricing trend or risk sitting in larger unsold inventories than they're comfortable with. Of course, this remains a problem for ASUS throughout the world, should the company not extend the price-cut to other regions other than the U.S.

Prices of graphics cards on eBay (where you're most likely to find them), dropped by 10% on average, according to prices tracked and aggregated by Tom's hardware. This still means overpriced high-end graphics cards, but price adjustments in the mid-range and performance-segment bring some respite to gamers. In the high-end, you'll now find the GeForce RTX 3090 go down from roughly $2,609 to $2,341. The RTX 3080 Ti, which almost as fast at gaming, can be had for $1,721, compared to $1,874 earlier. The popular RTX 3080 (10 GB original) sees its price slip from $1,613 to $1,440.

Prices of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA2 graphics cards are relatively lower, even though they perform in the same league. The RX 6900 XT can be had for as low as $1,421, which is lower than even the RTX 3080 (significantly slower). The RTX 6800 XT is a revelation here, with February prices seeing it average $1,176. This card more than trades blows with the RTX 3080. Over in the performance segment, we see The RTX 3060 (12 GB) average $850 compared to $930 earlier; while the RX 6600 XT does $570 compared to $610 earlier (similar performance). It must be noted here that there are far fewer Radeon RX 6000 series cards than GeForce RTX 30-series, in circulation. With the chip-supply crisis showing no signs of going away in 2022, MSRP will continue to elude gamers.

NVIDIA's RTX 3090 Ti graphics card could very well be a Spartan from 343 Industries' Halo, in that it too is missing in action. Originally announced at CES 2022 for a January 27th release, the new halo product for the RTX 30-series family even had some of its specifications announced in a livestream. However, the due date has come and gone for more than half a month, and NVIDIA still hadn't said anything about the why and the how of it - or when should gamers hoping to snag the best NVIDIA graphics card of this generation ready their F5 keys (and bank accounts). Until now - in a statement to The Verge, NVIDIA spokesperson Jen Andersson said that "We don't currently have more info to share on the RTX 3090 Ti, but we'll be in touch when we do". Disappointed? So are we.

While the reasons surrounding the RTX 3090 Ti's delayed launch still aren't clear - and with NVIDIA's response, we're left wondering if they ever will be - there were some warning signs that not all the grass was green on the RTX 3090 Ti's launch. The consensus seems to be that NVIDIA found some last-minute production issues with the RTX 3090 Ti, which prompted an emergency delay on the cards' launch. The purported problems range from issues with the card's PCB, BIOS, and even GDDR6X 21 Gbps memory modules - but it's unclear which of these (or perhaps which combination) truly prompted the very real delay on the product launch.

NVIDIA today announced the latest in the trend of branded PC customization. Taking the form of the new "RTX On" keycaps, NVIDIA has brought brushed aluminium reflections outside the scope of virtual worlds, and straight towards gamer's (and fan's) keyboards. Built "exclusively for the NVIDIA community", the new "RTX On" keycaps don't require a powerful RTX 30-series graphics cards to enable any eye-candy, which will come as good news for the many users still looking to upgrade their GPUs in the current pricing climate.

NVIDIA's keycap is prominently shown as a replacement "Escape" key - the most common of keycap replacements. This seems like a wise decision, considering how the RTX logo is a textured affair that might otherwise interfere with frantic gaming, typing or programming scenarios. The keycaps, which NVIDIA has said won't make it into retail products, will solely be distributed via the company's social media channels throughout Spring and Summer this year. The company has seemingly been investing more and more in similar community and social-media based offers - perhaps because scalpers have a harder time running away with stocks of these limited distribution products.

AMD is preparing a round of updates to its desktop Radeon RX 6000 series in the wake of RTX 30-series models by NVIDIA, according to Greymon55, a reliable source with GPU rumors. The company could be leveraging faster 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips for the task. This wouldn't be the first RX 6000 series products with 18 Gbps memory, as the liquid-cooled MBA (made-by-AMD) RX 6900 XT that's exclusive to OEMs, already comes with 18 Gbps memory clocks.

Mass-production of JEDEC-standard GDDR6 memory chips with data-rates as high as 20 Gbps and 24 Gbps by Samsung is expected to get underway later this year. The company is already sampling these chips, and it's likely that they may feature in the next round of product-stack updates by AMD and NVIDIA. In the run up to its next-gen RDNA3 graphics architecture, AMD is rumored to be working on a refresh of RDNA2 on the new TSMC N6 (6 nm) foundry node that it already leverages for the entry-level "Navi 24" ASIC. This is expected to open up headroom to dial up engine clocks, and possibly support faster memory. As for this latest refresh with 18 Gbps memory, if AMD's naming convention for its mobile RX 6850M is anything to go by, the new SKUs could feature a similar "xx50" model numbering.

Prominent chip designers like AMD and NVIDIA could bless consumers with a broader offering of their new products as soon as CES 2022 arrives. AMD should present its rumored Rembrandt-H lineup of processors based on the enhanced Zen 3 core, sometimes referred to as Zen 3+. According to the latest report coming from MyLaptopsGuide, Bluetooth SIG has some data entry about ASUS'es upcoming ROG Zephyrus Duo GX650 laptop that integrates AMD Rembrandt-H processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series graphics. As the website claims, the heart of this laptop will be AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX processor built on TSMC's 6 nm manufacturing process. We don't know much about this model, but we expect it to refine the previous Ryzen 9 5900HX.

We again see the rumored NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card for mobile, powering the graphics side of things. This model is supposedly based on GA103S GPU SKU, which is likely tailor-made for laptops in mind and exclusive to them. ASUS has also paired 16 GB of DDR5-4800 RAM with an AMD Ryzen processor, suggesting that Rembrandt-H has a new memory controller in place. This laptop model also has a 16-inch 300 Hz Full HD screen with anti-glare; however, the amount of information ended there. We have to wait for CES 2022 launch to find out more.

ASUS gave the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti its Turbo lateral-blower treatment. Designed for cases with a strict 2-slot limitation, or workstations with multiple add-on cards that have just two slots to spare for the graphics card, the RTX 3070 Ti joins other RTX 30-series "Ampere" cards from ASUS to receive this design. Its cooler features an aluminium channel heatsink that pulls heat from the GPU and memory over a copper plate (although it's not known if this is a vapor chamber plate like on the RTX 3090 Turbo). The lateral blower features double-ball bearings. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors located toward the tail-end (and not on top), these are right next to SSI mount holes that could come handy in workstation cases. The card sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds, with 1770 MHz boost clocks, and 19 Gbps (GDDR6X-effective) memory. The company didn't reveal pricing.

Well, that was a short one. Just last week we released GPU-Z 2.42.0, this week we have 2.43.0, which fixes a crash on older Radeon cards, including Radeon HD 5000. After last week's release people fired up these cards in masses, to see the change from AMD to ATI logo. This new activity helped uncovered a few problems, which are fixed with this update. We also fixed a screenshot feature bug that appeared since v2.39.0 on machines with Windows XP. GPU-Z adds the ability to read power limits of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series Laptop GPUs ("Ampere"), which will help you to find out exactly which Ampere Mobile SKU you have, what its power limits are, and whether you could flash its VBIOS to increase the limits. You can find these values in the "NVIDIA BIOS" section of the "Advanced" tab. The ability to report power limits for Ampere Mobile has been added to our VGA BIOS Database, too. The execution unit (EU) count of Intel Xe LP iGPUs on "Rocket Lake" processors has been fixed. Support is added for NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 series based on the TU106-B silicon. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.43.0

NVIDIA is rumored to be giving its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card family a mid-term refresh by the 2022 International CES, in January; the company is also targeting Q4-2022, specifically October, to debut its next-generation RTX 40-series. The Q1 refresh will include "SUPER" branded SKUs taking over key price-points for NVIDIA, as it lands up with enough silicon that can be fully unlocked. This leak comes from Greymon55, a reliable source on NVIDIA leaks. It also aligns with the most recent pattern followed by NVIDIA to keep its GeForce product-stack updated. The company had recently released "Ti" updates to certain higher-end price-points, in response to competition from the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series.

NVIDIA's next-generation will be powered by the "Lovelace" graphics architecture that sees even more hardware acceleration for the RTX feature-set, more raytraced effects, and preparation for future APIs. It also marks NVIDIA's return to TSMC, with the architecture reportedly being designed for the 5 nm (N5) silicon fabrication node. The current-gen GeForce "Ampere" chips are being products on an 8 nm foundry node by Samsung.

According to the latest market pricing analysis conducted by 3DCenter, the falling GPU prices we reported two months ago are now in the midst of a reversal. The latest figures show an increase in average pricing for both AMD's RX 6000 series and NVIDIA's RTX 30-series graphics cards. The hike has been most felt on the NVIDIA camp, with average pricing increasing around 9%, while AMD graphics cards saw an increase of 6%. This places the latest pricing average for graphics cards from both companies at 59% above MSRP for NVIDIA, and 64% for AMD.

While the increase is still a far-cry from the ridiculous markups felt during the month of May (where NVIDIA graphics cards were being sold at an average 304% of their MSRP value and AMD's where going for around 202% of their MSRP), this trend reversal is a clear indicator of a continued inability to cater to the pent-up demand that's still being trickle-filled since the original release of these GPU families. And this happens despite numerous positive signals happening within the last few months, such as the crypto crackdown in China, which saw hundreds upon hundred of mining-bound graphics cards being resold towards the secondary market. Also of note for an eventual positive price action was the recent reduction in Ethereum profits for miners due to the implementation of Ethereum's EIP-1559 proposal - which has already seen 136,619 ETH being burned as a part of transactions run on the network - the equivalent of $433,768,155 at current ETH pricing. And with news that shipments of NVIDIA's RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti graphics cards will be halved throughout September, paired with a TSMC price hike for newly minted wafers, it seems that an upwards pressure on GPU pricing is inescapable.