Nvidia’s next-gen 7nm Ampere graphics cards could be revealed as soon as March

Nvidia will be announcing its Ampere graphics cards – possibly meaning next-gen 7nm consumer products – at its GTC conference in March, according to a new rumor.

Although we should clarify a couple of things immediately, the first being that this isn’t the firmest rumor we’ve ever heard, coming from a ‘new source’ who has spoken to Wccftech – albeit the tech site says that this source has been correct with their speculation once before.

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The second thing to note carefully is that the source claims Ampere cards will be revealed at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, but didn’t say anything beyond that. So it’s not clear what kind of product might be launched in terms of a consumer GPU or a heavyweight data center offering.

This lines up with a previous rumor, which indicated a GTC reveal, followed by a full launch at Computex, and of course this makes sense as a likely plan for Nvidia – assuming next-gen cards are ready to go, which a few rumors have claimed now.

However, that previous rumor did suggest the first Ampere GPU would be a heavyweight computing affair, with the consumer (gaming) graphics cards to follow in the form of the RTX 3080 and 3070 (as they will presumably be named – with the cheaper cards like the 3060 coming later still).

Who knows, as this is all guesswork, but at least going by the previous speculation, this initial GTC reveal could possibly be just a data center card – or we could see consumer products as well, of course (particularly because this is just an initial announcement, by all accounts).

The one thing we can say is that if these rumors really are on the money, and an Ampere reveal of some kind is coming at GTC, then we can probably expect to see some more leaked details about the next-gen graphics cards spilling out online soon enough.

Big performance boost

Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards are expected to be built on a 7nm process, and while any spec or potential performance details have been pretty thin on the ground with leaks thus far, we have heard that the GPUs could be up to 50% faster than Nvidia’s existing Turing cards and will offer a major performance jump with ray tracing.

There’s also the tantalizing possibility that the high-end cards like the RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti could be cheaper than the existing top-of-the-line efforts, which would obviously be a very welcome change, too.

From what we’ve heard thus far, then, Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards are shaping up to be pretty impressive, and they could launch in a timeframe where they might seriously mess up AMD’s high-end Navi GPU launch (a product which is expected to go on sale at some stage this year, possibly around the middle of 2020 according to previous speculation).

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