Nvidia has dropped a tease for a mysterious new Project Beyond on their Twitter.
While they have not shared more details there is a lot we can infer from the circumstantial evidence. Notably, this was tweeted out on the Nvidia GeForce account, which is the branding for their gaming line of GPUs. So there is no confusion that this is specifically for these consumer products, and that it is for gaming and not other consumer applications.
Now, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to speak at the GTC (GPU Technology Conference) for 2022 this coming September 20. This event is usually more of an industry conference, where Nvidia discusses high performance computing and has more of a focus on developers. However, Nvidia has been known to use the event to hype their GeForce GPUs as well, and Huang has already confirmed she will be talking about the upcoming RTX40 line.
Now, this announcement comes at a curious time for the company, and the gaming GPU industry in general. In the past few years, consumers had been adversely affected by the rise of blockchain technologies. At first, it was particularly the rise of crypto mining that had led to gaming GPUs being hoarded by blockchain companies and investors in a large scale.
Consumers now had to face supply shortages for GPUs, and higher prices from resellers as blockchain had brought up the demand for the product. And then, the pandemic exacerbated the situation even more, as it had led to supply chain and manufacturing issues, particularly for the semiconductors needed to make these GPUs.
But in more recent months, the crypto market itself had faced a bubble burst, leading to the blockchain based economy imploding from within. Today, demand for GPUs from the blockchain industry has bottomed out. Coincidentally, prices for GPUs had also started to drop for Nvidia and its primary competitor, AMD.
It should be noted that no direct causation or correlation can be made between the drop in GPU prices and the fall of crypto. In fact, prices should be lower, closer to MSRP, if there was a direct relationship between the two. GPU prices are still adversely affected by the continued presence of resellers, who still adversely affect supply and price for these GPUs, to the detriment of consumers who just want to game.
While we have covered some rumors for the RTX40 line, nothing has been confirmed yet about the upcoming product. We do know that Nvidia has made incredible iteration in raising the performance between the RTX20 and RTX30 lines of GPUs, and consumers and industry insiders expect they will be able to duplicate that feat for the RTX40. However, there is something else Nvidia is known for in the industry that even their rival AMD cannot match.
Nearly a decade ago, Nvidia revealed that they had produced SOC technology that brought the performance of high end PC GPUs to portable devices like smartphones and tablets. A few years after that, they became Nintendo’s official manufacturing partner, supplying their mobile Tegra SOC for the Nintendo Switch.
While the industry seems to expect nothing more than a new generation of PC GPUs, Nvidia has pulled the hat trick that made them a bigger part of the industry than ever before. Could they be revealing new hardware for the destined Nintendo Switch successor? Or will they have an even more surprising announcement in the cards? We’re only a little over a week away from finding out.
Source: PCGamer
