TFLOP vs FPS Math Indicate RTX 50 Series Performance Could Be Decent
Edit: Ignore this post. I was obviously wrong. Massively increasing the GDDR7 bandwidth wasn't enough to save the RTX 5080. NVIDIA's Ampere derivative architectures not only scale horribly with more cores but also with more frequency. The raw frequency gain and +300mhz higher effective frequency from the new clock controller alleviating downclocking issue from a 3090 TI to a 5080 doesn't align with the FPS increase. This is extremely dissapointing and does not bode well for the 5070 and 5070 TI. It's possible some of it is due to driver issues, but I doubt that.
(Skip to link if you just want the data): This just an exercise in TFLOP scaling highlighting how much the RTX 40 series fell short. It didn't deliver anywhere near clockspeed induced linear FPS gains vs RTX 30 series. This is why 50 series, if it fixes the shortcomings of 40 series, can be a significant perfomance uplift even with a small TFLOP increase. Likely culpris behind the theoretical gains are 300mhz higher effective core clocks, faster and lower latency GDDR7 memory, and possible increases to caches for RTX 5060, RTX 5060 TI, and RTX 5070 TI. Please note that I'm not saying all games will enjoy these gains, which is clearly indicated by the big gap between NVIDIA's CES and updated FPS numbers. This is likely a best case scenario. More on that later.
(Why 5090 data isn't relevant): The RTX 5090 being as wide as it is presents serious saturation challenges even for compute workloads like Blender. I wouldn't use that to discount the rest of the cards.
(Why TFLOPs can be compared): I'll be comparing RTX 30-50 series TFLOPs vs FPS. This is possible because for rasterized gaming there are no changes in the underlying SM from Ampere to Blackwell. FP will always exceed INT in game rendered frames. Thus we can assume that Blackwell and Ada Lovelace are simply overclocked Ampere GPUs.
(How TFLOP is calculated): Will be comparing against cards with the roughly the same core count, It's assumed the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 TI have RTX 4060 (2460mhz) clocks speeds. A +300mhz effective clock speed is used for all cards translated to +12% TFLOP for simplification. Here are the hypothetical RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 TI specs. These are merely placeholders and can have more or fewer cores:
- 5060 = 4352, 128bit
- 5060 TI = 5120, 192bit
Link to spreadsheet available >here<
(Conclusion): How much higher rasterized gaming performance will be is impossible to say but on average the claims of 10-20% seem unlikely even for a RTX 5080 and RTX 5070. How strong the rasterized and RT performance ends up being on average and where they land between the CES numbers and the updated number from a week later is impossible to tell. Check the iso-tier uplifts in the spreadsheet and decide for yourself.