Are you amped for Nvidia Ampere graphics cards? Of course you are – these green machines should be some of the best graphics cards in 2020 upon their release. We’ve all assumed for the longest time that the new Nvidia GPU generation will come to market in Q4 2020, but there’s now a rumour that they might be arriving much sooner than expected.
The French tech website Overclocking has reported that the new Nvidia RTX 30-series cards could arrive as early as next month (August). Overclocking says, “Other information from our own sources allows us to think that Nvidia could announce its next RTX in the course of August. Official availability would be immediate (Founders versions) and the first custom cards could arrive in September.” (translated into English via Google).
A surprise August release would certainly get people pumped, and might even go some way towards combating AMD’s upcoming Navi 2X graphics cards, a lineup that will supposedly include the ‘Nvidia killer’ Big Navi GPU. A surprisingly early RTX 30-series release could put AMD on the back foot, at least for a short while.
However, as VideoCardz points out, the majority of Ampere rumours currently doing the rounds point towards a September release date. These rumours being ITHome‘s suggestion of a September 17 release date, Moore’s Law is Dead saying that the series will launch in September, and Igor’s Lab hinting at 30-series reviews surfacing in September – and, as we know, hardware reviews usually come out at the same time as the components are announced and released.
This isn’t to say there might not be a nugget of truth in the August rumour, however. If reviews and releases happen in September, it goes without saying that production will have begun in August. And ITHome, in the aforementioned article, says that Nvidia is already reportedly discontinuing production of RTX 20-series graphics cards to make way for the 30-series cards.
The question dividing these rumours is whether a September release will mean a Founders Edition release or an AIB (add-in board) release. If it’s the former, then September really will be the first we officially see of the RTX 30-series cards, but if it’s the latter we can assume a Founders Edition release beforehand, possibly during August.
Whether it’s August or September, what the rumours do concur on is that we should be getting our first official look at Nvidia Ampere consumer graphics cards very soon. It’s the difference between next month and the following one, which isn’t too long at all in either case, in the grand scheme of things.