NVIDIA Ultimate Countdown Ends in 18 Hours!
I know I know, I should have been posting about the NVIDIA ultimate countdown #ultimatecountdown for the past two weeks but, to be honest, I wasn't really all that excited. Sure, it was great looking down memory lane and seeing many of the products I reviewed be brought back.
The intent is to get people excited about what is coming next. Rumor is we have RTX 3000 series GPUs ready to hit the market and, again, that was really no surprise. NVIDIA has been doing regular product releases since their inception in 1999 and really hasn't missed a beat. It is very agile, very nimble and also very predictable.
So, when did the NVIDIA excitement fade for me? The quick answer is... GTX 1000 Series
There was a lot that happened during that release.
NVIDIA stopped sampling Hardware Asylum. Now, before you start calling "boo hoo and call me a whiny little bitch" you have to realize that, as a media site, when a major manufacturer cuts you off you lose your primary source of information. Everything that comes in is always second hand and that simply will not do.
On top of that, we have the worldwide shortage due to the mining craze so the NVIDIA board partners removed all media stock to maximize profits. That translates into no review samples and thus nothing to write about. I still believe that this was a very smart move since cards were selling there is no need to spend any extra on marketing. It just sucked for me.
We also cannot discredit the death of 3-way and 4-way SLI and the push of SLI only to the ultra high-end video cards. We can thank the overclocking community and EVERY consumer for that.
and, Finally the death of "real" NVIDIA overclocking. By "real" I mean GTX 900 Series overclocking where voltage mods and external VRMs actually made a difference. Not this Base Clock Power Limit bullshit where Boost Clock is basically the overclocking limit of the card. There is no challenge in that and anyone believing that it is real overclocking is just kidding themselves.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm I really am looking forward to seeing what will be next from NVIDIA and how the rumored RTX 30X0 series will change the gaming landscape.
Here are my predictions.
- RTX 30X0 (or whatever it is called) will be a babystep in basic gaming performance. Similar to what we saw between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super
- Prices will be $200-$500 USD more than the current RTX 20X0 level across the board
- NVIDIA will spend most of their time talking about RayTracing and other RTX centric features and ignore basic throughput (there is no need since AMD has no RayTracing option yet)
- Cards will come with more onboard memory to support the RTX enhancements. Consumers will see that as the second coming
- If NVLINK is an option will be on the highest end card only. I see it as being offered on Quadro only.
- EVGA will have a new Kingpin edition RTX 30X0 card and it will look just like the RTX 20X0 version
- All Board Partners will offer cards with discrete waterblocks but only at the highest level meaning that anyone wanting to watercool will be limited to reference design or deep pockets edition
- RTX 30X0 (Or whatever) will be the RTX card to buy, it will be more refined, games will finally start supporting RTX features and existing builds will struggle to support the new card (by existing builds I'm talking the 8+ year old AMD rigs that people keep using cause they are poor and don't know any better)
Let’s see if any of these come true. I'll try to remember to talk about it on the Hardware Asylum Podcast
Related Web URL: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/
