A few days ago, Jensen Huang hosted Nvidia’s CES 2019 event, and during the event, there were multiple announcements. The GeForce RTX 2060 cards were officially revealed (although let’s be honest, we knew everything by that point anyway), Mobile RTX series was officially revealed and Nvidia was keen to tell us they were embracing Adaptive-Sync via DisplayPort.
But there certainly wasn’t any mention of the so-called “GTX 11” series of cards, and that’s not necessarily a surprise. These cards are (supposedly) without Ray Tracing technology, but also considerably cheaper. Their simultaneous launch with the GeForce RTX 2060 and the RTX 20 mobile parts would take some of the wind out of those products sails.
But, another day and another alleged leak, this time from GFXBench, where there’s an entry showing up as a GTX 1180. Examing the performance numbers then, and it’s pretty much on par with that of an RTX 2080 card.
This almost certainly rules out the GPU being a Pascal Refresh. as we’d otherwise see the performance numbers have a larger discrepancy – despite them being conducted with two different operating systems.
There are then a few questions – firstly, is this a legit leak, or has someone just messed around with the card (either with the drivers, Bios or whatever) to add in a false entry? It is certainly possible, and frankly, until we see ‘real’ evidence of the card there should be some level of skepticism.
But then, if it is real, and the GTX 11 series of cards is really still based on the Turing cores we all know and errr, love? How have the RT cores been disabled? Have they been laser cut as some of them were defective, are they not cut, but locked out in BIOS. but some of them are defective and therefore can’t function properly?
This is hardly the first time we’ve seen rumors and info regarding the GeForce GTX 11 series, EXPreview (a Chinese website) has reported that the GeForce GTX 1160 is indeed a ‘thing‘, but it was reported to launch in January, so it’s possible it was delayed or their sources are wrong as there’s been nothing else since then.
We have certainly heard a lot of rumors concerning Nvidia’s competition – namely AMD and what they’re planning for CES. As of writing this, there are less than 24 hours remaining before AMD reveal what they’ve been working on.
Logically, and internet rumors tell us that AMD isn’t going to hard launch anything at CES, and instead, we’ll be seeing Vega 2 launch in the second quarter of this year (2019). Is it possible then, that Nvidia is going to gobble up the most sales they can now and then counter to the more budget (if you can call a several hundred dollar graphics cards a budget) markets later on with the GTX series?
Who really knows at this point, other than Nvidia themselves. Logically speaking, Vega 7nm would be aimed at the prosumer market, and there are fewer rumors concerning the presence of Navi at CES than Vega, which is curious. This possibly means that either AMD are keeping a tighter lid on the Navi rumors, or Navi will not debut until later in the year for whatever reason.
The rumors I’ve been told (and closely matched by a few other industry whispers) is that Vega 7nm will be faster than a GTX 1080 Ti, but cost considerably less than the RTX 2080 Ti.
In regards to Nvidia, Samsung is being tasked by the company to produce 7nm GeForce cards in 2020, and indeed will be one of Samsung’s 7nm launch partners (along with IBM).
This possibly means that Nvidia’s strategy would be to launch RTX now, capture the high-end market, launch GTX in the second quarter, then launch the GeForce 30 (or whatever its called) in 2020 with a 7nm process and numerous architecture improvements.
