NVIDIA Teases ‘Ultimate GeForce’ Announcement To Coincide With GDC

If you pay a visit to NVIDIA’s website right now, you’ll be greeted to a splash page that teases ‘Ultimate GeForce’ with a countdown timer. When that timer finishes, it’ll be Tuesday, the 28th, 7PM PST (10PM EST). So of course, the big question is: what in the heck is going to be unveiled?

At this point, it seems most opinions are that the announcement will be of the long-awaited GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, the new top-end GeForce card. I am not ignoring the existence of the TITAN X, but that’s not an official GeForce card, as it’s more targeted at compute markets.

Some other rumors hint at the fact that the announcement could revolve around Pascal refresh cards, although I am not too confident on that one. The GTX 1080 and 1070 were launched just 9 months ago, so it seems a bit early for a refresh, unless NVIDIA is concerned enough with AMD’s upcoming Vega-based Radeon GPUs to launch a preemptive strike.

What I do feel is likely is that NVIDIA will have more than just hardware to announce. I’d love to see two things, personally. First and foremost, it’d be great to see an announcement of an overhauled driver, because AMD’s Crimson does make it a little dated at this point – and not to mention, it’s still slow in some areas (especially when first opening the “Manage 3D Settings” section). NVIDIA recently contributed a whack of code to the Qt project, the framework AMD uses for its Crimson driver, and while this particular code revolved around NVIDIA’s DRIVE platform, it does show that the company has been using it, so its use could spread to other areas.

Another thing I’d love to see is the company’s GeForce NOW cloud-streaming service for SHIELD be ported over to the PC. As we covered at CES, this service allows people to stream high-quality gaming from a cloud server, with minimal lag. This would be awesome for those with low-spec PCs, and especially Linux and Mac gamers who are locked out entirely from certain titles.

What do you anticipate NVIDIA will unveil next week, or what would you hope to see?