One of the largest gaming expos in the world, gamescom, will be held in Cologne, Germany from August 21-25 this year. The convention typically sees major announcements, not just from video game publishers and usual suspects like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, but also from hardware and peripheral vendors, making it a perfect platform for next-gen GPU launches.
After the release of GeForce 10 Series GPUs based on the Pascal architecture in 2016, Nvidia has been rather tight-lipped about their next-gen roadmap. This even culminated with its CEO, Jensen Huang, saying that next-gen GPUs were ‘still a long time away’, back at COMPUTEX in June. However, contrary to that statement, we’ve seen multiple leaks over the past few months of Nvidia"s next-gen GPUs, including images of an alleged engineering sample, and reports alluding to an end of August launch date for the GTX 1180 SKU, with other SKU"s following shortly after.
With today’s announcement of a GeForce event at gamescom, Nvidia is finally breaking the silence. Team Green has promised ‘some spectacular surprises’ at the event, which in all likelihood point to the announcement of GeForce 11 series GPUs, lining up perfectly with the end of August launch time frame. However, Nvidia will adjust initial production schedules and volumes, depending on how fast retailers are able to clear out inventories of current-gen graphics cards, so as to target an appropriate price differential at launch. While not yet confirmed, the GPUs are likely already in mass-production, possibly on TSMC’s 12nm node, with a 7nm refresh by the end of 2018.
If rumors are to be believed, the GTX1180 is shaping up to be a monster GPU with 3,584 CUDA cores, up to 16GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory, and clock speeds of up to 1.8GHz. No word yet on how these specs translate into real-world performance, or how they stack up against current GeForce 10 Series GPUs and offerings from AMD, but we should find out soon enough.