Nvidia’s next-gen Lovelace GPUs could launch sooner than you think
For the past few years, Nvidia has been all but in charge of the graphics card market, due in no small part to the popularity of its RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti line. Even though AMD’s new Navi GPUs have been getting better and better by the day, they still won’t be able to beat their Nvidia counterparts anytime soon – at least that’s what the general consensus seems to be right now. However, according to a new rumor, Nvidia could be trying to launch their next-gen Lovelace GPUs as soon as next year instead of 2020 like it was initially planned.
What is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card?
The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, using a new 12 nm manufacturing process, and packs 4352 CUDA cores. The ‘Founder’s Edition’ of the RTX 2080 Ti features 2944 MHz base and 14110 MHz boost. This compares with 2432 CUDA cores and a 1800 MHz boost frequency on board Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti. The RTX 2080 uses 2560 CUDA cores running at 1710 MHz. Both cards are available in 8 GB and 11 GB GDDR6 memory variants, with 448 GB/sec memory bandwidth for both cards. In terms of performance, Nvidia claims that it can run games up to 5x faster than its previous generation – though we won’t know how well it stacks up until we get our hands on review samples later in October.
Why are the new graphics cards powerful?
To begin with, Nvidia’s new line of GeForce RTX graphics cards—the RTX 2080, RTX 2070 and RTX 2060—are built using technology called ray tracing. This is a technique that maps light rays in computer graphics onto physical objects (as opposed to rasterization, which maps pixels on to physical objects). Ray tracing basically allows developers to simulate real-world physics by creating digital light sources in 3D space and tracking how those rays bounce around.
What will be available in the future?
While we don’t yet know what Nvidia’s upcoming RTX hardware will look like, here are some of our expectations based on current and past hardware. As far as which ray tracing technologies will be supported by these new cards, Nvidia has stated it plans to develop open standards for accelerated ray tracing and heterogeneous computing that make it easy for game engine developers to integrate these techniques into their programs and reach a broad range of gamers.
Will current graphics cards disappear?
We don’t know yet, but there are good reasons to think that might be possible. Let’s look at what we know, from a hardware perspective, about Nvidia’s new RTX graphics cards. First of all, they’ll be faster—potentially much faster. That alone makes them worth buying, because even if your current PC can handle anything you throw at it now, it doesn’t mean it will still run like gangbusters in a few years.
