AMD's slated 'Nvidia killer' could be sent packing
NVIDIA'S NEXT-GEN GRAPHICS CARDS could pop up in mid-2020, according to analyst Chris Caso of Raymond James.
That rumour comes via Chinese site HKEPC, with has Caso letting slip to the website that Nvidia has held back on launching its next-gen Ampere architecture as its Turing-based GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards are going gangbusters. Given Team Green is cranking out 'Super' versions of its RTX cards, there's definitely some credence behind Caso's observations.
As such, come Computex 2020, roughly around June next year, there's an expectation next-gen GeForce RTX cards will pop up. The reveal of such graphics cards will be preceded by the unveiling of Nvidia's Ampere architecture at its annual GTC event in San Jose, which normally happens around March.
The card Caso expects Nvidia to reveal at Computex 2020 is the GeForce RTX 3080, a successor to the RTX 2080.
There are no details around what specs such a card might sport, but we predict it'll be focussed on improving ray-tracing performance across the board but particularly at high resolutions. And that it'll have faster GPU and memory clock speed, as well as an improved thermal design power for better energy efficiency.
Given AMD is apparently working on an 'Nvidia killer' graphics card for 2020, we wouldn't be surprised to see Caso's predictions bear fruit. Nvidia is not one to let its dominance of the PC graphics card market slip, which is probably why we've seen the likes of the GeForce GTX 1660, a lower-end take on the RTX card which taps into the Turing architecture but eschews ray-tracing and deep learning supersampling chops.
Speaking of DLSS, we expect Nvidia will push more of its deep learning tech into its next-gen GeForce cards, allowing them to use AI-based tech to improve graphical fidelity without putting PCs under punishing performance pressure.
Hopefully, this will all mean that 2020 becomes a particularly exciting year for graphics tech, in the same vein 2018 was when the Turing cards first made their appearance. µ
