Next-gen GeForce 11/20-series cards will reportedly use GDDR6, could be unveiled this summer

Nvidia might have revealed some amazing hardware at its recent GTC event, including the $400K DGX-2 supercomputer and the $9000 Quadro GV100 GPU, but there was no mention of any of its upcoming gaming cards. However, one memory supplier has revealed that the next GeForce generation will use GDDR6 and could be announced sometime in July or August.

South Korean semiconductor supplier SK Hynix told Gamer Nexus that its GDDR6 memory is set to reach mass production in three months and will be used in several of Nvidia’s products, such as autonomous vehicle components and gaming GPUs.

This doesn’t mean the new cards will launch as soon as this summer, but it certainly suggests we won’t see them any time before July. It's likely that Nvidia will reveal precisely when they’ll arrive and further details of the GeForce 11 (or GeForce 20) line in just a few months.

GDDR6, which will reportedly be found in Nvidia’s Tesla and Quadro parts as well as its new GeForce cards, will boast bandwidth upwards of 16Gb/s. It will run at 1.35v and be 20 percent more expensive to produce than current cards, so expect the 1170 and 1180 (or 2070 and 2080) to cost noticeably more than the 10-series launch prices.

SK Hynix confirmed the GDDR6 chips would come in 1GB and 2GB densities, and that the new line of cards will feature up to 16GB of video RAM—more than the Nvidia Titan Xp’s 12GB. It’s speculated that the 1170/2070 and 1180/2080 could include 8GB and 16GB RAM, respectively.

The news hasn’t cleared up the confusion over Nvidia's Ampere and Turing architecture roadmap. Some still suspect that the former could be the name used for its upcoming gaming-based cards, while the latter may be designed for cryptomining GPUs. Hopefully, things will be a lot clearer by the time summer rolls around.