NVIDIA Teases ‘Ultimate Countdown’ As Next-Gen GPU Rumors Heat Up

NVIDIA is teasing a 21 day ‘Ultimate Countdown’, just days after detailed pricing & launch date rumors for its upcoming Ampere GPUs emerged.

Ampere is the codename for NVIDIA’s next generation GPU architecture. The current RTX 20-series cards use the Turing architecture, and the new cards are expected to use RTX 30-series naming.

Ampere is already used in NVIDIA’s AI data center accelerators, so some details of the architecture are known. It moves from a 12nm fabrication process to the new (more efficient) 8nm and introduces 3rd generation tensor cores, which power DLSS upscaling and other AI features.

Across its GeForce social media channels, the #UltimateCountdown posts are accompanied by a new ’21 Days. 21 Years.’ banner image.

21 days from today works out as August 31, so keep an eye on NVIDIA later this month- or check UploadVR where we’ll break down any Ampere announcements.

The Latest Rumors

In the months before every new generation of GeForce GPUs launches, the rumor mill is active with claims of specs, product names, launch dates, and even pricing.

The most cited recent rumor is Wccftech’s report published over the weekend, with apparent basic specs and launch dates of five potential RTX 30-series products:

Rumored ProductRumored VRAMRumored Bus WidthRumored Launch
RTX 3090?24 GB384-bitLate September
RTX 3080 Ti?20 GB320-bitOctober
RTX 3080?10 GB320-bitMid September
RTX 3070?8 GB256-bitLate September
RTX 3060?8 GB256-bit

CUDA Cores are NVIDIA’s stream processors, similar to the cores of a CPU. VRAM is the amount of fast random access memory available, and the memory bus dictates the amount of data transferable per clock cycle (GPUs typically cycle billions of types per second).

This rumor doesn’t include the increases to clock speed and other key specs that will likely improve via the move to the more efficient 8nm node process.

Ampere is also rumored to introduce GDDR6X memory. If these claims are real, there should be a considerable increase in performance over Turing.

While Wccftech has a track record of getting these specs right in the past, the outlet has also had its fair share of misfires too.

Regardless of the validity of current leaks, we’ll be keeping a close eye on NVIDIA in the lead up to the apparent August 31 event.

Are you looking to get a new GPU when Ampere drops, or are you holding off a few more years- or for AMD? Let us know in the comments below!

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How To Enable NVIDIA VRSS On RTX Cards For Sharper VR Quality In Supported Games

NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS) dynamically increases the resolution in the center of the lenses instead of wasting performance on the entire view.  Here’s how to enable it for supported games.

VRSS was announced and released at CES 2020. VRSS will only activate when the GPU is not already fully utilized. This means activating this feature shouldn’t prevent you from maintaining frame rate. This is important in VR because dropping frames can make you feel sick.

Supported Titles

This is a driver-level feature, so it doesn’t need integrated by developers. However, it will only work on a specific list of 24 games which have been tested by NVIDIA. As of writing, these are the supported titles:

  • Battlewake
  • Boneworks
  • Eternity Warriors VR
  • Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
  • In Death
  • Job Simulator
  • Killing Floor: Incursion
  • L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files
  • Lone Echo
  • Mercenary 2: Silicon Rising
  • Pavlov VR
  • Raw Data
  • Rec Room
  • Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality
  • Robo Recall
  • Sairento VR
  • Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope
  • Skeet: VR Target Shooting
  • Space Pirate Trainer
  • Special Force VR: Infinity War
  • Spiderman: Far from Home
  • Spiderman: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience
  • Talos Principle VR
  • The Soulkeeper VR

Update The Driver

To use VRSS, you’ll need to be on driver version 441.87 or later, as that was the version which added the feature. This is a stable release — so there is no need to download Beta drivers.

If you use the GeForce Experience tool, you can update your driver using it as usual.

Otherwise, you can download the latest driver from NVIDIA’s website.

Enable In NVIDIA Control Panel

To open the NVIDIA Control Panel, right click your desktop to find the shortcut. Once it opens, navigate to the Manage 3D settings tab.

Within 3D Settings, select the ‘Program Settings’ tab and scroll down to the very bottom setting.

Set it to ‘Adaptive’ in order to have the driver enable it when performance allows, and increase and decrease it based on what your card can currently handle.

That’s it! VRSS will now be enabled for the game you selected. Note that you’ll need to manually do this for each supported game you want to use VRSS. Hopefully NVIDIA adds an option to enable it for all VRSS supporting games in the future.

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CES 2020: NVIDIA Increases VR Sharpness For RTX Cards With Variable Rate Supersampling

NVIDIA just released a new driver feature which dynamically increases the resolution in the center of the lenses instead of wasting performance on the entire view. It currently supports over 20 VR games.

PC VR users often increase the rendering resolution of a game to beyond the resolution of the physical display panels. The result is a sharper image with less aliasing, and it makes text easier to read. This is called supersampling, and is available via the Oculus Debug Tool or SteamVR Settings.

Supersampling takes a significant performance hit as it demands the graphics card to render many more pixels. This means users have to use a relatively low supersampling value to maintain performance. Additionally, since many titles don’t support dynamic supersampling the user has to use a trial and error approach to find the right balance.

NVIDIA’s new feature, called “Variable Rate Supersampling” (VRSS), solves both of these problems. It dynamically applies up to 8x supersampling in the center of the view only, where you’re almost always looking in VR.

VRSS will only apply when there is enough GPU headroom left over to do so, and as such you’ll still be able to maintain refresh rate framerate in VR (avoiding sickness).

NVIDIA VRSS

This is a driver-level feature, so it doesn’t need integrated by developers. However, it will only work on a specific list of 24 games which have been tested by NVIDIA. As of writing, these are the supported titles:

  • Battlewake
  • Boneworks
  • Eternity WarriorsTM VR
  • Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
  • In Death
  • Job Simulator
  • Killing Floor: Incursion
  • L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files
  • Lone Echo
  • Mercenary 2: Silicon Rising
  • Pavlov VR
  • Raw Data
  • Rec Room
  • Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality
  • Robo Recall
  • SairentoVR
  • Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope
  • Skeet: VR Target Shooting
  • Space Pirate Trainer
  • Special Force VR: Infinity War
  • Spiderman: Far from Home
  • Spiderman: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience
  • Talos Principle VR
  • The Soulkeeper VR

NVIDIA claims that it will continue to test more VR games and will add them to future driver releases.

The company’s benchmark chart is claiming a roughly 50FPS increase over using regular supersampling of the same quality.

This of course isn’t the first time we’ve seen this concept applied to VR. Facebook’s standalone VR headsets use a similar idea in reverse– reducing the quality of the edges of the view to save performance and thus allow intensive games to be ported.

Before VRSS back in 2018, NVIDIA itself gave developers the ability to supersample in the center of the view via the VRWorks SDK. However, only a handful of apps added support for this. The lack of developer adoption may be why this is now an adaptive driver level feature.

Based on our experience with Oculus standalone headsets and PC games using VRWorks, expect the differences in resolution between the center and edges to be noticeable, but not distracting.

Given that VRSS is applied automatically so that it won’t affect performance, it seems like a feature that all PC VR users with an RTX GPU should enable. You can do so in the NVIDIA Control Panel under 3D Settings. Set it to ‘Adaptive’ rather than ‘Always On’. Currently, it needs to be applied for each game.

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VirtualLink Still Isn’t Mandatory On NVIDIA’s RTX Super, But More Cards Support It

Back when the original NVIDIA RTX graphics cards released, we noticed that the VirtualLink USB Type-C port was not compulsory for the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070.

More of the new NVIDIA RTX Super cards now support VirtualLink, but still far from all of them.

What is VirtualLink

VirtualLink is a new USB-C single cable standard for future VR headsets and the GPUs/laptops they connect to. It’s intended to simplify the setup process of VR and ensure compatibility with USB and power requirements of future headsets. It also allows gaming laptops to guarantee support for VR.

It provides headsets with a minimum of 15 Watts of power and 10 Gbit/sec of USB data. That’s more power than three USB 3.0 ports would provide, and as much data as two would. Furthermore, VirtualLink GPUs must include a standards compliant USB controller for this data.

If you’re not sure why it’s important, here’s Why The VirtualLink USB-C Port Matters.

RTX Didn’t Make It Mandatory

While the RTX Founders Edition cards had VirtualLink, many partner cards did not. On the most affordable RTX GPU, the 2060, just one partner card featured the port.

Check out our list of Every Graphics Card And Laptop With The VirtualLink USB-C Port for a full rundown.

RTX 2070 and above feature a VirtualLink port

This decision could have consequences in the long term. Consumer PC VR headsets will need to continue to support legacy ports, which may mean shipping with a power adapter and increased costs.

RTX Super Is Better, But Still Lacking

A total of 7 partner RTX 2060 Super cards feature the VirtualLink port:

  • EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER XC ULTRA GAMING [08G-P4-3163-KR]
  • EVGA RTX 2060 SUPER XC ULTRA GAMING [08G-P4-3163-KR]
  • ASUS ROG Strix GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER [ROG-STRIX-RTX2060S-8G-GAMING]
  • ASUS ROG Strix GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER™ Advanced edition [ROG-STRIX-RTX2060S-A8G-GAMING]
  • ASUS ROG Strix GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER™ OC edition [ROG-STRIX-RTX2060S-O8G-GAMING]
  • GIGABYTE RTX 2060 SUPER™ GAMING OC [GV-N206SGAMING-OC-8GC]
  • GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER [GV-N206SAORUS-8GC]

VirtualLink consortium members

That’s a big change over the one original 2060 card. But that still means the majority of cards do not support VirtualLink. Meanwhile, no AMD GPU on the market supports VirtualLink, not even the recently released RX 5700 XT.

NVIDIA and AMD are both founding members of VirtualLink, so it is possible the companies make it mandatory in their next architectures.

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