Looks like Nvidia is getting ready to show off something this month. First, they updated the official GeForce Twitter account banner, which now reads “The #Ultimate Countdown”, along with “21 days, 21 years”.
Accompanying that was a tweet that showed a teaser that looks akin to the creation of the universe.
…#UltimateCountdown pic.twitter.com/f23HcbHUk6
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) August 10, 2020
This gives us something to look forward to in 21 days, which is August 31st. As for 21 years, this looks to be a reference to when Nvidia released its first graphics card back in 1999, the GeForce 256. Which I remember as I had started working in the now-defunct CompUSA so I could save up for one of my own.
So, what is this event all about? Is it a celebration of 21 years of Nvidia innovation? Or could this perhaps be an event for Nvidia to finally reveal its Ampere consumer line-up? My bet is this is going to be both, because why not? Ampere is easily one of Nvidia’s biggest revolutionary advances in GPUs, in some time. According to several insiders, Ampere looks to be a massive performance increase over the current Nvidia GeForce RTX 20xx cards, while offering significant Ray-Tracing performance as well.
Of course, this is all speculation, but if I know Nvidia and it’s colorful CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, we should all get ready for a show. And possibly prepare our wallets, especially if Ampere ends up being revealed, along with a price and release date. We all saw what happened in 2018 with the release of Nvidia’s Turing based GPUs, and they were damned expensive.
