Tom is a UK-based word spewer with a taste for everything weird and wonderful about games kick-started by a transformative play-through of Metal Gear Solid many moons ago. Adores Hollow Knight, probably a bit too much.
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Something’s brewing over at camp NVIDIA if a new cryptic tweet authored a few hours ago is anything to by, as it features a countdown to the last day of this month and what is presumably a major announcement.
Accompanied by the hashtag #UltimateCoundown (not to be confused with that obnoxiously catchy The Final Countdown tune), the tweet published on the official NVIDIA GeForce Twitter handle features a short clip of an explosion of Big Bang-like proportions followed by the sound of a ticking clock. The text portion of the tweet features nothing more than a rather unhelpful ellipsis.
…#UltimateCountdown pic.twitter.com/f23HcbHUk6
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) August 10, 2020
NVIDIA has also switched up the banner image on its Twitter account, which helps shed a bit more light on how long this mysterious countdown. It reads ”21 days. 21 Years” implying that something equaling NVIDIA’s 21 years in the GPU game, both in scope and scale, is happening in exactly three weeks from today on August 31st, 2020.
For context, the GPU giant announced its first GeForce graphics card, GeForce 256, back on August 31st, 1999. In what way whatever NVIDIA has up its sleeves harks back to 1999 is unclear right now, but its banking on making as much of a splash this time around it seems.
If we don our speculative bonnets and apply a bit of logic, we reckon this is the first official sign that NVIDIA is gearing up to unveil its long-rumored and highly-anticipated consumer-level gaming RTX 3000-series Ampere GPUs, spearheaded by the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080.
The timing is a little earlier than grapevine murmurs and various reports, which have previously pinpointed September as the likely time-frame for NVIDIA’s next big reveal. Still, we’re not talking months, rather a matter of a few weeks, so it appears to fit the bill. Furthermore, a late August announcement would match the reveal-to-release pace NVIDIA adopted last time around with the RTX 2000-series GPUs. They were unveiled at GamesCom in August 2018 before going on sale a month later on September 20th.
As always, we’d caution against shouting this from the rooftops just yet. NVIDIA may be teasing something else entirely. Maybe some form of commemorative 21st-anniversary shindig or something as equally underwhelming for those chomping at the bit for some RTX 3000 Ampere news.
Nevertheless, NVIDIA is well aware that players are eager for an official reveal, and we’d like to think they wouldn’t toy with our emotions by delivering a dud at the end of August. It’s been a tough year for everyone with the whole pandemic and all; a big flashy GPU reveal could do well to lift the spirits of many people out there.
With the whole Ultimate Countdown theme tease, we’re likely to hear a lot more as August 31st approaches, at which point we’ll be far better placed to make a final assessment on what NVIDIA is cooking up.
