It's been a while since we saw any rumors regarding the upcoming graphics cards from Nvidia, but it seems that the rumor mill has been working hard. There is word out on the web that the new Nvidia GTX 880 and the GTX 880 Ti, the latter of which we can't even be sure will exist, will be cheaper than their GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti predecessors.
The exact details regarding how much cheaper the cards will be remains unknown, as does the validity of this rumor, so don't get your hopes up yet. This rumor appears to stem from a forum post, so we have our doubts (it could simply be a teenager tired of not being able to afford high-end graphics cards trying to put pressure on Nvidia). We're not saying that we don't want to see it happen, we just don't think that it will. The most realistic thing to believe is that the cards will be cheaper to manufacture, but to expect this to translate to lower retail prices is a bit of a pipe dream.
Moving on, there is also a report going around that there will be a graphics card based on the GM204 GPU that will carry 8 GB of GDDR5 memory running over a 256-bit memory interface. This report stems from an import list from the website Zauba.com, where an entry is shown with the details of a test board. We're not sure whether to believe that we'll be seeing retail cards with 8 GB frame buffers as reference solutions, but rather just 4 GB. However, these are clearly labelled as test boards, so they are not representative of final products.
Despite everything, the new GPUs from Nvidia are expected to be baked on the 20 nm lithographic process, which combined with the new Maxwell architecture will make them quite efficient. Dreadful rumors aside, we do expect the new hardware to come out somewhere towards the end of 2014, early 2015. We might not immediately be looking at the high-end hardware, but we'll probably see at least one new Maxwell-based GPU coming around that time.
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