NVIDIA: Volta-based cards to come in 2018 with impressive specs

[Legendary Silke]

Hmm... I think I might be looking forward to the GTX 1060 Refresh/GTX 1060 Ti/GTX 1160/whatever NVIDIA decides to call the refresh of the 1060. At least, with a cautious approach... and maybe even a future, Volta-based 1160/1260 might be a better idea, if the refresh ends up amounting to not too much of a performance increase between cards of a similar rank. Given that it's a refresh, I suspect how much things would improve with Pascal Refresh basically boils down to yields and binning.

Volta seems a bit far away, but on the other hand, by the time the cards based on it arrive, my video card will be conveniently out-of-warranty, so no qualms about replacing it if it's broken. Or too slow.

If anything I suspect NVIDIA will probably provide just 24 GB of video RAM for their top, super-premium consumer-use video cards; 16 GB for the high-end ones; and 12 GB for the rest, and a 8GB 1050 refresh. Probably something like that would make more sense if they need to add more video RAM. As it is right now, though, 6GB is rather excessive, let alone 8 or 12. Me with a GTX 970 and 4GB (or for those that insist, 3.5GB+0.5GB) is now rather average in terms of VRAM, and there now exist some games whose VRAM usage would be too high for comfort if I stray beyond 1080p without tuning down the VRAM sinks.

Honestly, though, I welcome more video cards coming our way... video cards just keep improving every other year, no? It's very unlike desktop CPUs today.

Ya know, memory sure clocks really high today, even without an ultra-wide bus! A 256-bit video card 10 years back would have had a fraction of effective clock speed compared to what you can get with a maxed-out GDDR5 or current-generation GDDR5X 256-bit solution.

 

[Melody]

Certainly if someone buys a card like this after it hits the streets; they will be really certain their PC will be futureproof graphics-wise for quite a good period of time. I can see 24 or 48GB of VRAM being super excessive yes, but actually quite effective in completely removing the video overhead of programs. This is certainly going to quicken up a PC quite a bit if it previously had a video card that couldn't absolutely swallow the demands of a game before. (And really, to be quite honest you don't really need to go very much higher than 1080p unless you also own an ultra high resolution display as well.

I think a card that's potentially this futureproof will be a good investment, you'll stand to benefit the most if you buy the cream of the crop card from this batch and not need to buy another card until the next major series of cards drop at least, and enjoy the freedom of playing all your favorite modern games in hopefully your monitor's native resolution with all the nice little bells and whistles enabled. Even if you don't go big and buy the biggest card of the crop; I'm actually pretty certain that any of them will be a nice card to have if you're an nVidia fan.

I'm curious to see what AMD's answering salvo of cards will be like to this; I think that'll be pretty interesting to see.

 

[killer-curry]

Here comes the stupidest questions

Can it play Minecraft?


Yeh, it really good to see how far the Company have plan to build such a future proof card, but I just want to see if they are becoming even smaller And comparability for laptops