It has been two years since Nvidia launched the 10-series of its GeForce GTX lineup that was based on Pascal architecture. It provided a major boost in gaming performance, but it had its share of ups and downs.
Since the start of 2018 many rumors and speculations are going around about the next generation of Graphics cards from Nvidia, mainly about the architecture, pricing and release date of the newer Cards. Even the naming framework is also in speculations as it would either be 20-series cards (GTX 2080 and GTX 2070) – according to the folks at TWEAK TOWN – or more conventional 11-series (GTX 1180 and GTX 1170) cards according to our unnamed sources. In this article we’ll only use the conventional nomenclature.
Tweak Town also reported that the Graphics Cards would be released during the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) that held at the end of March. Unfortunately, the Graphics Cards were not revealed during the event even Nvidia did not talk about the next-gen architecture.
Starting our discussion with the architecture, Nvidia has boasted about its Volta architecture for quite a long time,and we had seen the capabilities of this architecture when The Titan V was on display at the end of last year. It was based on TSMC’s 12nm manufacturing process which marks a significant step up from the 16nm process in power consumption and processing power, thus the Titan V was able to get graphical computing power of 110 TFLOPs, the graphical computing power of the GPU in XBOX one X that promises 4k 60 gaming is only 6.1 TFLOPs for reference.
It showed the vast realms of capabilities Nvidia can achieve because of 3 years of effort on Volta architecture; it will not be completely out of the blue if the next generations cards are based on the Volta. On the other hand, rumors are also suggesting that the Turing architecture will be used in the Graphics Cards, it is speculated that the Turing architecture is roughly a gaming spinoff of the Volta architecture that requires less cost in production, there is not much information about it as Nvidia has not even talked about it in the GTC event.
However, the PC enthusiasts are looking for Volta based graphics cards in the future as it will provide better overall performance than the current generation.
Coming to the memory that will the new chips use, the rumors suggest that a new GDDR6 memory will be used in the production, it was almost confirmed when SK Hynix was reported to start the mass productions of the GDDR6 memory,and it signed a massive deal with Nvidia.
Apart from that many other silicon giants like Samsung and Micron are also getting involved in the GDDR6 memory production and technology, again giving more credibility to the rumor. At the start two VRAM configurations of 8GB and 16GBbased on 256-bit GPUs operating at 16Gbps will be shipped to Nvidia suggesting that the GTX 1180 will have memory in between 8 to 16 gigs.
The GDDR6 memory will cost 20 percent more to the manufacturers than the GDDR5, but it will narrow down with the advancement in technology as the newer production methods will follow.
Due to the mass production of memory, it is expected that all the next generation cards will be based on the GDDR6 memory even the lower-end ones will also be getting it. The speed of the new memory will be significantly faster than the GDDR5 or any configuration of HBM2 memory;it would give GTX 1180 a huge memory bandwidth of 512Gb/s while GTX 1080 had only 320Gb/s and GTX 1080Ti provides 484GB/s
SK Hynix, a South Korean Memory chip company told PCgamesn that it was planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card [sic] by early 2018 equipped with high-performance GDDR6 DRAMs.
The pricing bit is going to be ambiguous as were the prices of the graphics cards back in the mining days, nowadays with mining just getting subsided the prices are tamed to some extent.
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As it is the case with Nvidia every new generation is priced at some premium, just like the Pascal cards were a bit expensive than the Maxwell cards, it is speculated that the prices of this generation will follow the same suit. The GTX 1180 will be priced at around $699 like the GTX 1080Ti as it is expected that it will be more closely related to the 1080Ti rather than 1080.
The alleged specifications of the GTX 1180 include 3,584 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory interface with 8 to 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, clocked at 16Gbps. The rumored date of revelation is E3 that is in July according to Toms Hardware, while the more credible release date would be August/September at the Gamescom or Nvidia’s independent event.