Nvidia Ampere A100 is the world’s fastest GPU by a long shot

While the Nvidia Ampere A100 GPU has been around since May, we’ve only just seen the first benchmarks for it. Released by Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY and maker of OctaneRender software, he announced how well the card performed via Twitter over the weekend.

Getting straight to the point, the Ampere A100 GPU scored 446 points in OctaneBench, one of OctaneRender’s benchmarks. That immediately makes it the world’s fastest GPU beating the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti by a whopping 144 points. Effectively, that means the Ampere A100 GPU is up to 47.7 percent faster than Turing, although it is a little like comparing apples to oranges given the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is a consumer card while the Ampere A100 is aimed at data centre products. Still, it gives some tangible insight into just how fast the difference is. 

It’s also worth noting though that the fastest Turing card listed on the OctaneBench benchmark database is the Quadro RTX 8000 which scored 328. The actual world record holder before the Ampere A100 was the Nvidia Titan V which scored 401 points. So, the Ampere card still managed up to 11.2 percent higher performance than the last big hitter. 

That result also emerged with RTX turned off on the Ampere A100 with suggestions that it could have been even higher if it was switched on. The Ampere A100 offers 6,912 CUDA cores and 432 Tensor cores along with 40GB of HBM2E memory across a 5,120-bit memory interface leading to a bandwidth of up to 1,555 Gbps. A slouch, this isn’t. Not that it’s designed for consumer setups, of course. 

Realistically, we won’t see improvements of 47.7 percent across the board when it comes to the consumer launch of Ampere technology. As with any benchmark, this will have been conducted under specific conditions and, of course, it’s unlikely that Nvidia will translate the Ampere A100’s performance directly to the consumer market given the pricing that will be involved.

Still, it’s a fascinating insight at a time when we’re all keen to see more of what the next generation will offer for gamers and the consumer market, and it’s certainly impressive going.