A few days back, a rumor was making the rounds that NVIDIA would be launching some new graphics cards at either the Games Developers Conference (GDC) or its own Graphics Technology Conference (GTC). Lots of gamers and enthusiasts out there were very excited at that prospect, as GPU shortages are making it difficult and very expensive to buy a new graphics card right now. Unfortunately, a new rumor is making the rounds that throws cold water on the rumor from a few days back.
The new rumor claims that multiple sources have confirmed that the most gamers can expect from NVIDIA at GTC or GDC is an announcement and perhaps some sort of teaser of the new cards. Other sources cited by Toms Hardware claim that the Turing-based video cards won’t start mass production until mid-June and that the launch of cards from board partners won’t happen until July. This would seemingly mean that Computex in June is out for a new NVIDIA card launch as well.
Production of partner cards in July would align with Gamescom in August, making that the most likely event venue for the new cards to be unveiled. The cards might even be available to purchase at the same time. Board partners haven’t yet received Turing specs, so they can create a bill of materials and start development testing; that isn’t expected to happen until May.
There is no clear indication of what the hold up is right now on Turing-based cards. Perhaps the issue is that there is no real pressure on NVIDIA to rush the cards out. AMD and its Radeon Vega graphics cards aren’t applying the pressure needed to force NVIDIA’s hand to get Turing cards out more quickly. NVIDIA is expected to continue the rollout of the Volta architecture and word is that Ampere-based cards won’t see consumer versions.
Speculation suggests that when the GTX 2060 and GTX 2080 cards do launch, they will be packing Samsung-built 16 Gbps or 18 Gbps GDDR6 RAM. The real question is whether gamers will be able to get hands on these new cards when they do launch, or if the crypto miners will gobble them all up.
