Jen-Hsun Huang has confirmed that Nvidia is going to be finally giving us some concrete details about its new RTX 40-series graphics cards at the GTC event in September. Jen-Hsun needed to finish his recent Q2 2023 financial call on a high note—after posting gaming revenue 44% down on the previous financial quarter—and so throwing out the promise of Lovelace details at GTC was his best bet.
Having already spoken at length about that big decline in gaming revenue, repeatedly reminding Nvidia's investors that gaming's fine, gaming's good, people are still buying graphics cards, it's okay, he notes that "we'll get through this over the next few months and go into next year with our new architecture."
"I look forward to telling you more about it at GTC next month," Huang then says.
Ah, new architecture! We've been stuck reading ever-changing rumoured details, specs, speeds, and feeds for the past year, but finally Jen-Hsun's keynote on September 20 might actually give us something solid to look at regarding the new Ada Lovelace GPU tech.
The GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is traditionally a more data centre/AI focused event, with little focus on gaming products, but given that we're expecting Nvidia to only release the very high end of the RTX 40-series this year that might fit perfectly with the GTC ethos. The RTX 4090 will sit in the same professional user spot the RTX 3090/TI occupies right now, meaning it's more for creators than gamers, after all.
It's possible Jen-Hsun could have simply been referring to the advances in its upcoming Hopper architecture for data centres, something that has been spoken about in detail at this month's Hot Chips event. But he specifically mentions the RTX side of the business.
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"I look forward to next month’s GTC conference," says Huang, signing off on a financial analyst call he wouldn't have wanted to be on, "where we will share new advances of RTX reinventing 3D graphics and gaming."
It's rare we get mentions of gaming at GTC, so it looks like it's definitely going to be worth tuning in to the keynote on September 20. And if Lovelace is getting unveiled towards the tail end of September then that makes a potential October release for the RTX 4090 even more likely.
