It seems that there is still little urgency in Team Green’s camp to introduce its next-gen video cards, with AMD not quite forcing their hand into unleashing Turing-based hardware into the market.
Two big gaming related conferences are coming up at the end of this month, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Nvidia’s Graphics Technology Conference (GTC). Folks anticipating announcements of next-gen GPUs at one of these gatherings are likely in for a disappointment, as Nvidia is not in any particular rush to move us all to their next big graphics architecture.
Industry signs point to only teasing and vagueness at these two shows rather than anything solid about the successor to the current crop of Pascal-based video cards. As noted in TechRadar’s review of the high-end AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, Team Red is in the game as far as matching Nvidia’s line up but second best when it comes to power efficiency:
We’d disagree that Pascal is completely unbeatable. In our review of the AMD RX Vega 64 we found that the card is roughly on a par with the Nvidia GTX 1080 in terms of gaming performance. However, when it comes to power draw, Nvidia’s cards have a clear lead, drawing significantly less power than their competitors despite offering a similar level of performance. If you’re looking for the all around best card, then this could give Nvidia the edge if you care about power consumption, but we’d stop short of calling Pascal ‘unbeatable’, at least on a price to performance basis.
Nvidia’s next-gen gaming architecture, under the alleged “Turing” code name, is coming but tea leaves point towards a July launch at the earliest, given the logistics of bringing a new video card lineup to market. This means Gamescom in August is the next probable time for a big reveal from partners if it were to occur.
Hopefully, whatever the actual time of release, gamers will be able to get their hands on new cards in a decent time frame and at a reasonable price point but that will be influenced somewhat by cryptocurrency mining and how Nvidia decides to tackle it. Anyone looking to DIY a new machine or upgrade their current one will, at the very least, be stuck paying a lot more money than they probably planned.
