Nvidia socialled up an image on its official GeForce X account earlier in the week that got tongues wagging. A large monolith-style graphics card obscuring the sun and tagged 'Eclipse2024'? That's clearly a portentous teaser for the RTX 5090 coming later this year, right?
No wait, it's an RTX 4090 Ti, isn't it? Or should that be an RTX 4090 Super? I mean, it's definitely something that's just about to launch and is so incredibly exciting it will literally eclipse the sun. And yet, almost certainly, it's none of the above.
For starters, it's a still image from a teaser video posted back in January and in the lead up to the roll out of the then new RTX 40 Super series cards, including the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super.
So, it's almost certainly not previewing an unreleased graphics card. More likely it's just Nvidia saying, "the eclipse is cool, isn't it?" You know, on account of the actual full solar eclipse earlier this week.
Of course, it does look at first glance like a cryptic teaser image of something new. In fact, that's exactly what it was back in January.
It is, therefore, arguably a little bit naughty of Nvidia. It was bound to kick off a bit of a fuss. But even if it wasn't an old image, it's surely too soon for Nvidia to be teasing the design of the upcoming (we assume) RTX 5090. Likely, the earliest we'll see that new board will be October.
It's also if anything a bit too late for an RTX 4090 Ti or 4090 Super, if indeed we're getting that 5090 later this year. That doesn't really leave enough time for such a card to be on sale.
So, no, Nvidia hasn't just teased an Earth shattering or indeed solar eclipsing new GPU. And when you consider where we actually are in the GPU cycle, we're still a solid year away from new vaguely affordable graphics cards from Nvidia.
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However, AMD might just have some respite for us with its RDNA 4 cards, which are very much expected this year and all the rumours suggest will precisely target the mid-range rather than the high end, offering perhaps something akin to RTX 4080 performance for a whole let less money than before.
There's also Intel's upcoming Battlemage GPU, the second generation of its Arc line of graphics cards. The latest scuttlebutt there indicates a launch before Black Friday, in other words November 29th. Battlemage is also expected to land roughly in the RTX 4070 to RTX 4080 range in terms of performance.
If we get both later this year then the mid range really will be the most competitive it's been for absolutely years. Here's hoping.
