Nvidia Pascal rumors point to three GP104 GPUs in June
Nvidia gave us our first in-depth look at Pascal last week at its 2016 GPU Technology Conference when it announced the Tesla P100, a potent data center accelerator for high-performance computing (HPC) and hyperscale workloads. That only made us more anxious to see Pascal prance over to the desktop, and come June, Nvidia may launch three gaming videocards powered by Pascal.
The rumors are starting to heat up as we get closer to Pascal's impending launch to consumers. According to HardwareBattle, Nvidia is planning to replace three of its high-end cards with upgraded Pascal parts in June. The parts to be replaced include the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980, and GTX 970.
If the information proves accurate, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be replaced by a GP104-400 GPU in early June, with both reference and custom options available. Around the same time, Nvidia will replace the GTX 980 with a GP104-200 videocard, also available in reference and custom designs, followed by replacing the GTX 970 replacement with a GP104-150 graphics card sometime in the middle of June.
It's not clear how Nvidia plans to name its Pascal parts, whether it will run with a GeForce GTX 1080/1070 series, GTX 1800/1700, or something else entirely. The -400/200/150 suffixes on the part name are also new for Nvidia, and they might correlate with hardware in some fashion (e.g., the first two digits could indicate the number of SMs), but that's the realm of pure speculation at this point.
Bear in mind that none of this is official. That said, as Videocardz points out, HardwareBattle had previously leaked accurate information about AMD's Fury before it launched. In the meantime, check out our deep dive into the Pascal P100 architecture for what we know so far.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).
Nvidia says its surprisingly high $3.3B gaming revenue is expected to drop but 'not to worry' because next year will be fine *wink* RTX 50-series *wink*
AMD rumoured to be ditching future RDNA 5 graphics architecture in favour of 'unified' UDNA tech in a possible effort to bring AI smarts to gaming ASAP