Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge
Nvidia is teasing a mysterious announcement for August 31st. The graphics card maker is hinting a potential event on Twitter today, with a post that simply says “#UltimateCountdown,” accompanied by a video of a star going supernova. Nvidia has also updated its GeForce Twitter account header image with another teaser that mentions “21 days. 21 years.”
The supernova tease makes it clear that whatever Nvidia is planning to announce, it’s going to be big news, and it may come in 21 days’ time. Nvidia’s teaser comes just days after rumors suggested the company might be planning to launch its new Ampere graphics cards on September 9th. Nvidia is rumored to be launching RTX 3000 Series cards and presumably a GeForce RTX 3080 successor to the RTX 2080.
Wccftech also speculates that the countdown mention of 21 years might be related to the original GeForce 256 GPU. It’s been almost 21 years since the GeForce 256 launched back in 1999, and Wccftech notes that if you multiply 256 by 21 you get 5,376, which is a core count that was leaked recently.
Nvidia unveiled its Ampere GPU architecture back in May, but the first graphics card was built for scientific computing, cloud graphics, and data analytics. We still don’t know exactly what Ampere GPUs will bring to traditional PC gaming, but we might be about to find out at the end of the month.