Nvidia is about to celebrate the big anniversary of the first GeForce GPU, which was released back in 1999. This will make the much-loved GPU line 21 at the end of the month and it appears that Nvidia may have more than just an office party planned.
Yesterday, the Nvidia GeForce Twitter account dropped a quick video teaser with #UltimateCountdown while a new header image for the account gave us a bit more info with its "21 days. 21 years" tagline. But today, the company has kindly offered up further clarification with an official GeForce Special Event announcement set for 9 a.m. Pacific Time (12 p.m. Eastern) on September 1 (Via Engadget).
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Unfortunately, Nvidia wasn't too generous with the details, simply saying that CEO Jensen Huang "will highlight the company's latest innovations in gaming and graphics."
Of course, we have a pretty good idea of just what in the GeForce universe Nvidia is ready to unveil right now. Our best speculation is that we'll see the reveal of the RTX 3000 series GPUs, which would fall right in line with the pattern of the GTX 1080 announcement in August of 2016 and the August 2018 announcement of the RTX 2080.
...#UltimateCountdown pic.twitter.com/f23HcbHUk6August 10, 2020
The RTX 3080 will use the new Ampere GPU architecture, which is believed to use a 7nm process, a considerable step up from the current 12nm process used in the Turing architecture of the RTX 2080. Originally reported by TweakTown, rumors have suggested Ampere could deliver up to a 75% performance boost over Turing with roughly half the power consumption. If Nvidia delivers anything close to that, it will be a massive leap compared to the roughly 20% gains seen between the architecture switch from GTX 1080 and RTX 2080.
One potential wild card is the naming. The strong "21" theme in the announcement has caused some to theorize that Nvidia may go with "RTX 2100" naming for the series rather than RTX 3000, but we'll probably just have to wait for Jensen Huang to take the stage on September 1 to find that out.
How to watch Nvidia's September 1 event
You can visit the Ultimate Countdown page right now to watch the timer tick down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the event start at 9 a.m. Pacific time (12 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Central) and then you'll be able to watch the live stream of the announcement there.
Nvidia hasn't announced additional ways to watch just yet, but we imagine it will also be available live on its YouTube and Twitch accounts. If you can't watch it live, don't worry, we'll bring you all of the latest updates as they happen.
