Full NVIDIA AD102 GPU Allegedly Runs Control At Over 160 FPS In 4K

A recent leak about a full-fat NVIDIA AD102 Ada Lovelace GPU suggests that the top-tier GPU can and will run rings around the current king-of-the-hill, the GeForce RTX 3090. How fast is the card, you ask? Apparently, it can run Remedy’s Control at 4K resolution and above the 100 fps mark.

Now, to be clear, this rumour about the AD102 isn’t to be confused with the non-Ti variant of the supposed RTX 4090 that has been making its rounds online. By comparison, the full-fat AD102 GPU ships out with as many as 18432 CUDA cores, which is approximately 12% more CUDA cores than what the RTX 4090 is expected to ship out with.

Getting back on point, and according to a Twitter user that goes by the handle AGF (@XpeaGPU), the AD102 GPU was able to run the game Control at 4K resolution, with the framerates sustaining themselves beyond the 160 fps mark. Further, those framerates were also achieved with ray-tracing and DLSS enabled, but not without its own set of drawbacks. In order to achieves those numbers, the GPU was also reported to have pulled more than 800W off the wall.

By comparison, the RTX 3090 at the same resolution and ray-tracing parametres turned on would yield approximately half the number of frames. With our RTX 3090 Founders Edition, our framerate in-game hovered between 60 and 74 fps.

The arrival of this AD102 rumour is interesting, given that just yesterday, we posted a report about another rumour regarding the RTX 4090 and how it is expected to be nearly 70% faster than the RTX 3090. However, those performance numbers were supposedly pulled off an as-of-yet unconfirmed 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark and as such, should be treated with the usual consumption of salt.

For another matter, there are other missing variable that can render claims about the AD102’s prowess unreliable at this point. For starters, the source doesn’t specify the exact game settings the GPU was running Control with, nor did they say if the Lovelace GPU is actually using a new generation of Tensor Cores. Much like Ampere and its 2nd generation Tensor Cores.

Second, there aren’t any additional details about the AD102’s specs, not even its TDP or clockspeeds.

Important Caveats To Buying Video Games At Full Price

Over the weekend, John Garvin, a leading figure in the production of SIE’s Days Gone, said “if you love a game, buy it at *bleeping* full price”. This was quickly followed up by “don’t complain if a game doesn’t get a sequel if it wasn’t supported at launch”. He said this on David Jaffe’s YouTube podcast, on the subject of Days Gone seeing more engagement following its availability on PS Plus this month.

This is countered, sort of, a little later when Jaffe brought up the movies Austin Powers and Pitch Perfect. They didn’t do well in theatres, but later exploded when they became available on DVD, which then spawned sequels. You can watch this exchange at around the 2:42:00 mark of the video in question.

But getting back to the point of buying games at full price. Sure, it’s pretty much the best way you can tell developers of a game you like that they’ve done a great job. And it would be nice to be able to do that without getting ripped off. But the reality remains that it’s not that simple.

The argument against buying games at full price

There’s a good enough scenario to not buy games at full price, and that is if it launched in a messy state. And there’s no better example today than Cyberpunk 2077.

Even its refund situation was messy, never mind the game itself. Not to mention that the game had already received a discount or two in a prior Steam sale. Days Gone was in a similar situation too, at least during its review cycle. Now that the game is making its way to PC, it remains to be seen if history will repeat itself.

Then there are other reasons to not pay full price for a game. One is if it’s not your kind of game anyway, and you’re just looking to kill time. This may be because you’ve been cooped up indoors for too long in the past year or something. And obviously don’t buy a game at full price if you can’t afford to. That last one, in particular, really goes without saying.

Of course, there will come a time when it is indeed a good idea to buy a game at full price. But that’s still after you’ve gotten a fairly good idea of what you’re getting into. This means no day-one, no pre-orders, and most importantly, no buyers remorse at the end of the process.

No day-one, no pre-orders, no buyer’s remorse

Which reminds me of Star Citizen, actually. It’s amazing in its own way that people are willing to shell out the kind of money that the game is asking for. As for the game’s development (which is now entering its 10th year), it looks to be going along at its own pace. That being said, the process seems to be plagued with what looks like perpetual feature creep, with no end in sight. But that’s a topic for another day.

Naturally, the comment caused an understandable amount of online chatter that Garvin had to clarify what he said on Twitter. Though in all honesty, it doesn’t really help. Especially spicy is his disingenuous bit about “More power to you. Just don’t buy it on sale a year later, discover you love it, then wonder why a sequel never got made”.

And it’s also a little strange that the consumers are being put in the line of fire, when they have no power over what happens to games. After all, they’re not the one that decides that games should be pushed out before all the bugs are squashed. They’re also not the ones that get to decide if a game gets a sequel or not, regardless of if it sells well or not.

Beating the dead horse called piracy again

It’s probably also worth pointing out that Garvin also mentioned piracy. This horse has been beaten so many times, the carcass has shifted from the stable to the glue factory. No one but pirates condone piracy, but not every instance of piracy equals a lost sale.

As video game critic Josh Bycer said, if someone wants to pirate a title, they just wouldn’t pay for it. A title can go from launch to out of sale and a pirate still won’t hand over money for it. Minecraft creator Notch, as well as Daredevil comics writer Mark Waid, also have their own take on why piracy does not equal lost sales.

All in all, be an informed gamer. Don’t get pressured into paying full price for a buggy game just because it’s got strong sequel potential. Especially with our currency being so much weaker to the US dollar, and each game is like 25% of the local minimum wage.