Gamers disappointed that Nvidia didn’t unveil a consumer GPU when it unveiled its enterprise-centric Turing architecture at Siggraph 2018 will soon be in for a treat. Nvidia has just posted a teaser YouTube video hinting that it could unveil its next consumer-based GeForce RTX series soon. Given that Gamescom is just around the corner, Nvidia could unveil its next-generation RTX 2080 graphics chip at that venue.
The YouTube video contains hints that Nvidia may be announcing its GeForce RTX 2080 branding at the show. The video contains Discord handles such as RoyTeX (RTX), Not_11, Mac-20, and Eight Tee, which as observant users on Reddit noted would spell out RTX 2080. There has been speculation in the past that Nvidia will complement its GTX series with an RTX line, and that the two GPU families could exist together. “This also further lends credence to our story that the company is pursuing the RTX series as complementary to the GTX series and will add on top of the Pascal lineup and not replace them for now,” wccftech speculated.
“There are even GPS coordinates for Cologne in the Discord messages, and Nvidia unveils the date for its GeForce event by making the ‘2080’ numbers rise up in order at the very end of the teaser,” The Verge reported.
Another hint that the GPU will be announced at Gamescom comes from the location coordinates that Nvidia posted. “In one of the chats, a grid reference for somewhere in Cologne, Germany is posted, but if you enter these into Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s actually somewhere a little north of the Koelnmesse, Gamescom’s main venue,” Trusted Reviews noted.
While Nvidia was coy about its presence at Gamescom previously, the company noted that that there will be “spectacular surprises” and “new PC games running on the latest GeForce hardware.”
Additionally, the promo also shows the handle ‘Ray,’ which could be a hint that some of Nvidia’s ray tracing efforts may also be trickling down to consumer cards. Ray tracing was a major component of Nvidia’s Turing architecture announcement at Siggraph. Nvidia said that the new chipset contains an RT Core, and that the Quadro RTX is the world’s first ray tracing GPU. All that power comes at a cost, and the Quadro RTX 8000 flagship will be priced at $10,000 when it ships. Other key features of that chip include support for NVLink — to connect multiple cards together — and VirtualLink, which is used to connect virtual reality headsets using a single USB-C cable.
With Gamescom scheduled to start on August 21, we won’t have much longer to wait to hear about Nvidia’s branding efforts for its next-generation GeForce GPU and its capabilities.
