If you’ve been waiting to upgrade your PC with a new GPU for Cyberpunk 2077 or something else this year, finally the options are starting to emerge. Nvidia has begun teasing the official announcement of its upcoming Ampere line of GPUs, preparing people for a launch in “21 days”.
Update 11:20pm AEST: Nvidia has just informed press that the “GeForce Special Event” will be held on September 2, 2:00am AEST / 4:00am NZST / midnight AWST. “During the event, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang will highlight the company’s latest innovations in gaming and graphics,” Nvidia says.
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The timeframe, teased in a new banner photo for the Nvidia GeForce Twitter account, would mean we’d get an announcement on August 31, so September 1 Australian time. The timeframe matches up with roughly when the RTX 2000 series was launched, which coincided with Gamescom.
So far, the rumours have solidified around a mid-September release for the first of Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs. WCCFtech are reporting that the replacement for the RTX 2080 Ti — the new consumer gaming flagship, in other words — will launch first, which is exactly what Nvidia did with the RTX 2080 Ti’s release. That mirrors a similar launch window given to Gamers Nexus from their own industry sources, too.
…#UltimateCountdown pic.twitter.com/f23HcbHUk6
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) August 10, 2020
Three cards are expected to be available when the Ampere GPUs are announced. While the current understanding is that Nvidia will roll with the RTX 3000 naming convention, chances are they could skip a beat (like the 700 series to 900 series GPUs) and go for something totally different. In any case, it’s typically the gaming flagship and the two cards immediately underneath it which tend to get launched first. So that’d be a replacement for the 2080 Ti, 2080 Super and 2070 Super, with the next-gen 2060 equivalent and GTX-class entry level GPUs more likely to emerge sometime in 2021.
One Ampere product has been announced already, although it’s not a gaming GPU. It was the A100 Accelerator, unveiled in May when Jensen Huang pulled the thing out of his oven.
There’s some slightly crazy rumours being thrown around in terms of what the Ampere GPUs will actually have, with talk of 16GB, 20GB and 24GB VRAM on the higher end cards. (For comparison, the RTX 2080 Ti is an 11GB card.) Either way, I’ll just be looking forward to something that can power a game like Control with every element of ray tracing enabled, instead of having to make trade-offs. Also, having GPUs that can comfortably power those new 360Hz monitors would be very nice.
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