NVIDIA Volta Gaming GPUs Not Coming This Year

There hasn’t been a whole lot of talk about NVIDIA’s next-generation Volta GPU architecture. Around 3 months ago it was rumored that we could see gaming GPUs based on the architecture in Q3 of this year, but that definitely is not happening. And it seems we won’t see Volta until sometime in 2018.

volta nvidia

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a recent earnings call, “Volta for gaming, we haven’t announced anything. And all I can say is that our pipeline is filled with some exciting new toys for the gamers, and we have some really exciting new technology to offer them in the pipeline. But for the holiday season for the foreseeable future, I think Pascal is just unbeatable”

“It’s just the best thing out there. And everybody who’s looking forward to playing Call of Duty or Destiny 2, if they don’t already have one, should run out and get themselves a Pascal.”

I think one of the big reasons NVIDIA does not need to release Volta this year is because AMD’s brand new Vega graphics cards just can’t compete with NVIDIA. While the Vega 64 is somewhat competitive with the GTX 1080 it gets beat by the GTX 1080 Ti. On top of that Vega 64 consumes much, much more power than the GTX 1080.

Now NVIDIA says one of the main reasons they are holding off on an Volta launch is price. Right now you can get Volta in the form of NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 accelerator. According to Huang, these GPUs are “expensive things to go and design” and he estimates manufacturing cost to be “several hundred dollars to close to $1,000,” which he admits is “quite extraordinary.”

If I was guessing I would say expect to see a preview of Volta at CES in January and then a Spring launch?

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