Highly anticipated: A next-gen Nvidia flagship has been spotted in the 3DMark benchmark database. It's the first time we've seen a GPU in a performance bracket like this - if you discount the below photo that leaked a couple weeks back - with a performance output in 3DMark that appears to be up to 26% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti.

Let's plunge into the numbers. The GPU achieved a score of 18,257 in the graphics component of 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark. That score could be considered proof enough that this is a new GPU. A Titan RTX can't generally get that high without exotic cooling like liquid nitrogen.

Relative to the average scores that 3DMark provides, it's 21% faster than the Titan RTX and 26% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti. Thumbs up, Nvidia.

You should note, this ain't no run-of-the-mill GPU - this is an alien from the exotic GA102 species. That'll be the flagship die that a different set of GPUs could use: the next Titan, a stack of Quadro cards, and some gaming graphics cards potentially called the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

A few leakers are confident that the GA102 will have up to 5,376 cores, but there's no verdict on the precise core configurations of specific models, although strangely, everyone agrees on the memory capacities as specified in the tweet below...

Parties that approximately agree with these numbers include: Rogame, Kopite7kimi, and Igor's Lab.

It's been assumed that this next-gen GPU is the flagship RTX 3090 because of how well it performs, but it could also be the RTX 3080. That will all depend on how Nvidia decides to position and market the GPUs ahead of release.

Other things to note: 3DMark recorded a 1935 MHz clock speed during the benchmark, a 25% increase over the RTX 2080 Ti's 1545 MHz. In other words, the upcoming GPU doesn't necessarily need a higher core count than the RTX 2080 Ti to reach that performance bracket. However, it is expected that Nvidia will release at least one card that does have a higher core count, most likely by the end of the year.

Dark times await AMD Radeon fans, unless big Navi delivers, of course.