Thursday, March 1st 2018
Report: NVIDIA Not Unveiling 2018 Graphics Card Lineup at GDC, GTC After All
It's being reported by Tom's Hardware, citing industry sources, that NVIDIA isn't looking to expand upon its graphics cards lineup at this years' GDC (Game Developers Conference) or GTC (GPU Technology Conference). Even as reports have been hitting the streets that pointed towards NVIDIA announcing (if not launching) their two new product architectures as early as next month, it now seems that won't be the case after all. As a reminder, the architectures we're writing about here are Turing, reportedly for crypto-mining applications, and Ampere, the expected GeForce architecture leapfrogging the current top of the line - and absent from regular consumer shores - Volta.
There's really not much that can be gleaned as of now from industry sources, though. It's clear no one has received any kind of information from NVIDIA when it comes to either of their expected architectures, which means an impending announcement isn't likely. At the same time, NVIDIA really has no interest in pulling the trigger on new products - demand is fine, and competition from AMD is low. As such, reports of a June or later announcement/release are outstandingly credible, as are reports that NVIDIA would put the brakes on a consumer version of Ampere, use it to replace Volta on the professional and server segment, and instead launch Volta - finally - on the consumer segment. This would allow the company to cache in on their Volta architecture, this time on consumer products, for a full generation longer, while innovating the market - of sorts. All scenarios are open right now; but one thing that seems clear is that there will be no announcements next month.
There's really not much that can be gleaned as of now from industry sources, though. It's clear no one has received any kind of information from NVIDIA when it comes to either of their expected architectures, which means an impending announcement isn't likely. At the same time, NVIDIA really has no interest in pulling the trigger on new products - demand is fine, and competition from AMD is low. As such, reports of a June or later announcement/release are outstandingly credible, as are reports that NVIDIA would put the brakes on a consumer version of Ampere, use it to replace Volta on the professional and server segment, and instead launch Volta - finally - on the consumer segment. This would allow the company to cache in on their Volta architecture, this time on consumer products, for a full generation longer, while innovating the market - of sorts. All scenarios are open right now; but one thing that seems clear is that there will be no announcements next month.