Yesterday, Nvidia"s social media profiles began a 21-day countdown in celebration of of the 21st anniversary of the GeForce 256, the company"s first GPU, which was first announced on August 31, 1999. The company said it would "take a look back before looking forward", suggesting the announcement of new graphics cards at the end of the countdown.
Today, the company officially announced a GeForce Special Event, scheduled for September 1, where it will talk about its "latest innovations in gaming and graphics". Naturally, this means the company is preparing to announce the next generation of GeForce GPUs, as the RTX 20 series is nearly two years old at this point. As you"d expect, the event will include a keynote speech by CEO Jensen Huang.
Rumors up until this point have suggested the new family of cards will be called the RTX 30 series, and leaked benchmarks have showcased some notable performance improvements over the RTX 2080 Ti, Nvidia"s current top-tier model. It"s likely that only a handful of GPUs will be announced at first, as we saw with the RTX 20 series, which only debuted with the higher-end models - the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070. More affordable models should launch in the following months.
Nvidia has began its "ultimate countdown" on Twitter, starting with a look at a MicronPC Millennia Max model from 1999, which is where the GeForce 256 debuted (thanks to the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive, which allowed the retrieval of the press release from 1999). Nvidia will seemingly continue to provide a look at its historical releases throughout the years, which may be a fun walk down memory lane for those that remember those releases.