NVIDIA Teases Next-gen GeForce, Announcement Expected End Of Month

Earlier today, NVIDIA posted an eight-second clip of a star explosion, affixed with no other information aside from the hashtag “#UltimateCountdown”. Naturally, since this tweet came from the GeForce account, and we’ve been expecting an announcement any day already, we can pretty much be confident this revolves around NVIDIA’s next-gen gaming GPUs.

No announcement date is given in this tweet, but the header for the @NVIDIAGeForce Twitter account has been updated to say “21 days. 21 years.” The first part of that surely means that this announcement will take place at the end of the month, while the second part hints at NVIDIA’s first official “GPU”, the GeForce 256, released in late 1999.

…#UltimateCountdown pic.twitter.com/f23HcbHUk6

— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) August 10, 2020

The journey for NVIDIA’s Ampere to get here on the gaming side has been long. We first saw hints in 2018 that a release could happen, but of course, we instead got Turing – which turned out to be a seriously strong architecture itself, taking the Tensor cores from Volta, and adding ray tracing cores on top. More recently, NVIDIA finally unveiled Ampere in May, with its launch A100 tensor core GPU.

There have been a ridiculous number of rumors surrounding NVIDIA’s next GeForce series for a while, and it’s hard to say what’s actually true. What does seem obvious is that we’ll see a really nice bump in general performance, and an even bigger one with ray tracing and AI workloads. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait much longer to get the full details.

Something tells us that it’s time to update our gaming GPU testing suite…