All you need to do to watch the Nvidia Ampere launch is go to Nvidia’s GeForce event homepage and wait until the timer counts down to 5pm BST in the UK, or 9am PDT for those of you across the pond. Alternatively, you can sit on Nvidia’s Twitch page, which I’ve embedded below.
Truth be told, Nvidia haven’t actually said what they’re going to be talking about in their GeForce event today, so it could all be a load of cobblers about nothing in particular. However, the signs are there. At the end of last week, Nvidia posted an official teaser video talking about the design of their upcoming graphics cards, and over the weekend there have been leaks galore of both RTX 3090 / RTX 3080 cards and packaging all over the internet. Similarly, over the past couple of weeks Nvidia’s Twitter account has been reliving various technological achievements from the past 20 years with their Ultimate Countdown campaign, and their Instagram account posted last night that “The future is approaching so quickly.” As a result, I’d be very surprised if today’s GeForce event wasn’t about their Ampere RTX 3000 series GPUs. Instead, the key question is how many graphics cards will we see? So far, most of the leaks have been centred around the unusual design of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, the latter being this generation’s Titan-class GPU. We’ve heard next to nothing about the RTX 3070 or RTX 3060, so we may only get a glimpse of Nvidia’s flagship Ampere GPUs and nothing else. After all, Nvidia only revealed the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at their initial Gamescom launch back in 2018, and they waited until CES 2019 the following January before they lifted the lid on the RTX 2060. As a result, it’s possible we may see a similar strategy this time round, too, with the main focus today being on the high-end, 4K-oriented GPUs. At the moment, the rumour mill seems pretty convinced that the RTX 3090 will have a massive 5248 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory clocked at 19.5Gbps. The RTX 3080 is a little less certain. The current thinking is that there might be two variants of the RTX 3080: one with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, and one with 20GB. Both will be clocked at 19 Gbps, though, and have 4352 CUDA cores, but it’s currently not known if Nvidia will be keeping their current ‘Super’ branding to help differentiate the two versions, or whether they’ll both come under the same RTX 3080 moniker. We’ll just have to wait and see this evening. Either way, both of these cards are expected to come out sometime in the middle of September, with the RTX 3070 following in October and the RTX 3060 in November. It’s possible we’ll get a different event for those two cards, given their later release date, but again, we won’t know for sure until we see what Nvidia present later on. One thing’s for sure, though. These new graphics cards are expected to cost an absolute bomb, so the faster AMD release their upcoming 2nd Gen Big Navi graphics cards, the better, I say, because goodness knows we’re going to need the competition to help keep Nvidia’s prices in check. As usual, I’ll be covering Nvidia’s GeForce Special Event as it happens, so I’ll have some more concrete information on Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series at 5pm BST.
