Skip to main content

Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs could destroy Xbox Series X if leaks are true

Nvidia’s Turing-based RTX GPUs are some of the most powerful you can get your hands on today, but the next-generation is on its way. It appears that the company has begun testing its next-generation Ampere architecture, and a new series of leaked benchmarks are showing some promising results.

Recommended Videos

Several Geekbench 5 benchmarks were spotted by a Twitter user and then picked up by PCGamesN that detail some significant performance results and specifications for Nvidia’s upcoming GPU.

Stock photo of Nvidia T4 GPU
NVIDIA Newsroom/NVIDIA Corporation

Nvidia appears to have tested two Ampere GPUs with the codename of Fat Man and Little Boy, and what’s curious about these leaked early benchmarks is that the cards were tested on a non-high end system running an Intel Z370 Coffee Lake motherboard, according to PCGames N.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

The more powerful card, Fat Man, has a whopping 60% more streaming multiprocessors compared to the current GeForce RTX cards with a total of 118. If Nvidia maintains its current core-to-SM ratio from today, that will translate to 7,552 CUDA cores for Fat Man.

The card also comes 24GB of video RAM, matching what’s available on the premium Titan RTX card from today. Fat Man was tested with an unusually low boost clock speed of 1.11GHz.

PCGames N estimated that Fat Man to be capable of more than 33.5 TFLOPs at that clock speed. If Nvidia increases the speed on the card at launch, Fat Man’s computational capabilities could go even higher, making it a card that would be suitable for high end data analysis, deep learning applications, and artificial intelligence.

It’s unclear if Nvidia will be using Ampere for a rumored GeForce RTX 3080 launch, but it was previously speculated that the architecture may not be targeted at gamers, at least not initially given the massive amounts of video memory.

The less powerful Little Boy features 108 SMs but comes with double the memory of Fat Man. It’s clocked at 1.01 GHz in the leaked Geekbench test result. This should translate to roughly 6,912 CUDA cores and nearly 28 TFLOPs of compute power. Though not a direct apples-to-apples comparison of TFLOP performance, Microsoft recently revealed its new Xbox Series X comes tops out with 12 TFLOPs of compute power.

Microsoft / Microsoft

The TFLOP estimates assume that Nvidia will double its floating point units on Ampere, which would double the TFLOP performance. If Ampere doesn’t come with double the FP units, then the cards may max out with 17 TFLOPs and 14 TFLOPs, according to TechRadar.

Given that we still don’t know much about Ampere’s overall architecture, the CUDA core calculations as well as TFLOP approximations can drastically change when the cards are unveiled. And according to previous rumors, the Ampere graphics cards could potentially match AMD’s 7nm manufacturing process, giving it even higher efficiency than Turing.

With Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) slated to happen next month, where the company is expected to unveil Ampere.

Chuong Nguyen
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
25 years ago, Nvidia changed PCs forever
The GeForce 256 sitting next to a Half Life box.

Twenty-five years ago, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 and changed the face of PCs forever. It wasn't the first graphics card produced by Nvidia -- it was actually the sixth -- but it was the first that really put gaming at the center of Nvidia's lineup with GeForce branding, and it's the device that Nvidia coined the term "GPU" with.

Nvidia is celebrating the anniversary of the release, and rightfully so. We've come an unbelievable way from the GeForce 256 up to the RTX 4090, but Nvidia's first GPU wasn't met with much enthusiasm. The original release, which lines up with today's date, was for the GeForce 256 SDR, or single data rate. Later in 1999, Nvidia followed up with the GeForce 256 DDR, or dual data rate.

Read more
These AMD and Nvidia release date updates are giving me whiplash
PNY RTX 4080 with the power connector attached.

If you're wondering about the future of Nvidia's and AMD's top graphics cards, you're not alone. We all know it's almost time for the next generation of GPUs to be released, but no one knows when exactly that's going to happen. Today, another source weighed in with conflicting information regarding the release dates of the RTX 50 series and the RX 8000 series, and honestly, it's all starting to give me whiplash at this point.

At the beginning of 2024, most enthusiasts and leakers alike believed that all three GPU makers -- AMD, Intel, and Nvidia -- would launch their next-gen products before the end of the year. In fact, early leaks pointed to an end-of-summer release for AMD. As time went on, we've all tempered our expectations as it became clear that we're unlikely to see any new graphics cards before early 2025.

Read more
Next-gen GPUs are coming ‘later this year’ — but which?
RX 7900 XTX slotted into a test bench.

What's going on with next-gen graphics cards? I've been asking myself that question for months now. Reports about Nvidia's RTX 50-series and AMD's RDNA 4 first pointed to a 2024 release, but most sources now agree that we won't see any new GPUs until 2025. Except EK Water Blocks, a company that now claims that we'll see an announcement "later this year."

EK Water Blocks makes liquid cooling solutions, and it's partnered with both Nvidia and AMD, which makes it harder to determine which GPU manufacturer it's talking about here. According to the latest leaks, both GPU makers aren't launching their new products this year, although one source (admittedly uncertain) claimed that we'd have an announcement this month. This is now the second leak in as many days that implies good news in 2024.

Read more