Can't get your hands on an RTX 3080? Well too bad because it's time to forget why you were excited about that and focus on what the next drip feed of GPU technology advancement is. According to a new report from Videocardz, Nvidia has a new-generation of graphics technology based on the 5nm process. Its codename for now, Lovelace.
Named after famed computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, this comes as a surprise, as earlier reports penned Nvidia's first 5nm architecture as named Hopper. That has since been delayed, according to the leaker, claiming that it's likely Nvidia releases another roadmap at some point to accommodate its new GPU line.
Assumed to have a 2021-2022 launch window, Lovelace should be Nvidia's next-generation gaming architecture. Its shift to 5nm would give it a leg up on AMD if it were released today, but it seems quite likely that with AMD planning to launch a 5nm RDNA 3 architecture sometime in the future (it'll have to shift a few RDNA 2 cards first) then it would likely be Nvidia playing catchup again.
Few details are known about the capabilities of Nvidia's next-generation graphics, but a power efficiency and performance advantage from the process node seems likely. It didn't extract a massive improvement on that front with its Ampere GPUs, despite them being exceedingly powerful. It may be though, that with the long-rumors that Nvidia had initially planned a 7nm launch for Ampere, but had to opt for the Samsung 8nm node instead, it didn't get all the performance from Ampere that it planned.
A big node shrink from 8nm to 5nm with an architecture designed specifically for it, could yield momentous performance improvements.