The rumours of Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards have taken another, disappointing, twist. Igor Wallosek from Toms Hardware Germany is claiming that Nvidia’s plans are completely different to what had previously been mooted. Rather than a launch in Spring, Nvidia plans to release its Turing gaming graphics card architecture in July, pushing it all the way back to Q3 2018.
If you’re raising your eyebrows at Turing, that’s because of a bit of an about-turn on the naming. Nvidia has allegedly decided to name its successor to Pascal as Turing, the architecture we’d previously suspected would be aimed at cryptocurrency miners.
Speculation suggests that when the GTX 2060 and GTX 2080 cards do launch, they will be packing Samsung-built 16 Gbps or 18 Gbps GDDR6 RAM. The real question is whether gamers will be able to get hands on these new cards when they do launch, or if the crypto miners will gobble them all up.
There is no clear indication of what the hold up is right now on Turing-based cards. Perhaps the issue is that there is no real pressure on NVIDIA to rush the cards out. AMD and its Radeon Vega graphics cards aren’t applying the pressure needed to force NVIDIA's hand to get Turing cards out more quickly. NVIDIA is expected to continue the rollout of the Volta architecture and word is that Ampere-based cards won't see consumer versions.