Next gen GPUs are set to offer dramatic compute performance gains

Now that next generation high end GPUs are reaching the end of their design phase and entering the testing phase, we're getting more and more little bits of information as we get closer to the launches of the cards later in 2022.

The newest rumours suggest that Nvidia's next generation AD102 GPU could produce more than 100 TFLOPS of computer performance, which is more than double that of an RTX 3090 Ti. The info comes via a twitter discussion between serial and reliable leakers, Greymon55 and Kopite7kimi.

A TFLOP is one trillion floating-point operations per second. It's a measurement of the mathematical performance of a processor. A higher number doesn't necessarily translate into better gaming performance, but having higher floating-point capabilities mean that game developers have more resources to work with, though other factors in the system create their own bottlenecks. Raw shader performance is an advantage, but its only one part of the GPU.

Even though we expect next gen cards to feature a large increase in core/shader count, 100 TFLOPs of performance is still more than expected. This points towards a significant clock speed increase too. The higher the clock speed, the higher the TFLOP performance.

Nvidia's flagship GPU isn't the only one expected to see a dramatic TFLOP uplift. AMD's RDNA3 GPUs are expected to leap forward too. Greymon55 goes on to suggest that the 7900 XT could clock as high as 3GHz, if not more, delivering 92 TFLOPs or higher. 

But despite being impressed by these TFLOP estimates, I'm not entirely surprised. If next gen cards really do end up pulling 600W, if not a lot more, then I'd expect them to offer a performance increase that worthy of such a leap. Outright performance is fine, but performance per watt matters. Admittedly most of these leaks refer to the high end RDNA3 and AD102 GPUs. We have next to no information on the lesser GPUs in the range. They're just as important to the wider market, if not more so as they're the ones that sell in volume. They certainly won't use as much power.

The next GPU battle is shaping up to be an epic one. Hopefully all of those TFLOPs will translate into higher gaming performance.