We’re 100 percent sure Nvidia’s effusive CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, will be taking the wraps off the next generation Nvidia Ampere GeForce graphics cards today, live at the GeForce Special Event. And you can watch it all unfold here from 9am Pacific, 12pm Eastern, or 5pm UK time, and if the Twitch embed gets all funky we’ll have a YouTube stream here too.
But, after the professional Ampere unveiling, will this gaming-focused presentation be delivered from his kitchen, lounge, wine cellar, leather jacket-filled walk-in wardrobe, or some special, socially distanced venue?
That is, obviously, the important question, but there is also the small matter of the cards themselves. Today’s GeForce Special Event isn’t going to be the launch of the full suite of Nvidia Ampere graphics cards, we’re only really likely to get a glimpse of the Founders Editions of the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 launching in September, along with a few of their key specs.
The RTX 3070 is expected to arrive around a month later, so might get a cursory mention, but the mainstream Ampere cards aren’t likely to arrive until well into 2021 at this point.
We might get a hint of pricing but, given that we’re expecting the red team to pop up sometime soon with an AMD Big Navi spoiler, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jen-Hsun and Co. kept that particular bit of information back for the full launch of the top two Nvidia Ampere cards later this month.
Despite the fact that nothing official, bar a short design-led video, has been divulged about the new generation of GeForce GPUs, we do have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to be looking at. Thanks to a host of rumours and leaks the details seem pretty rock solid now, especially now that AIBs have all the information… and that has inevitably been leaked too.
| RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 | RTX 2080 Ti | |
| CUDA cores | 5,248 | 4,352 | 4,352 |
| Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X | 11GB GDDR6 |
| Memory clock | 19.5Gbps | 19Gbps | 14Gbps |
| Memory bandwidth | 936GB/s | 760GB/s | 616GB/s |
| TGP | 350W | 320W | 260W |
Though the actual GPU unveiling is likely to only be the finale of the hour-long GeForce Special Event, with much of the initial presentation likely to be given over to celebrating the last 21 years of Nvidia graphics silicon, with a few separate GeForce-y announcements, and a final “BAM! New graphics cards, y’all!” from Jen-Hsun himself.
But whatever goes down, we’re going to be on hand digging through the details and bringing you all the news from today’s big Nvidia event as it happens.