Nvidia’s next-gen GeForce graphics cards could launch at GTC next month and be on sale in April

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Rumor has it that Nvidia will launch its next generation of GeForce graphics cards at GTC 2018, the firm’s GPU Technology Conference, which kicks off on March 26, just a month from today.

This comes from a ‘well-placed source’ in the GPU industry who spoke to TweakTown.

The site believes the cards will be available as soon as April or May, and claims that the new GeForce products will be built on refreshed Ampere architecture, which should (obviously) offer boosted performance and better power efficiency compared to Pascal GPUs (Nvidia’s current GeForce 10 series).

This backs up previous speculation from Reuters, which also claimed that Nvidia would be launching these new graphics cards next month (although it didn’t mention GTC). Also, that report claimed the GPUs in question are codenamed Turing.

Naming confusion

As we theorized a couple of weeks back, it seems as if Volta – which has already been deployed in heavyweight cards like the Titan V – is Nvidia’s high-performance computing (HPC) architecture, whereas Ampere or Turing will be the consumer-orientated gaming cards.

Alternatively, TweakTown seems to think that Nvidia will be revealing both Ampere and an entirely ‘new architecture’, which could be Turing, with the latter designed to be a successor to Volta in the HPC world – while Ampere would be the GeForce gaming GPUs.

Ultimately, this is all still speculation, so we’ll just have to see how everything unfolds – but keep your salt shaker handy. However, if the initial launch is as close as just a month away, we're likely to hear further spillage and details very shortly.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).