Nvidia's next-generation GTX 1180 graphics card (and presumably its GTX 1170 counterpart) could be released as soon as July, despite neither being announced officially by Nvidia as of yet. The latest rumors suggest that the new cards are undergoing sampling right now and will be handed out to third-parties in mid-June, for the release of factory overclocked partner cards sometime in September.
Typically Nvidia releases new graphics cards as part of its "Founders Edition" range first, with slightly inflated price tags and almost always limited availability. That is likely to be the case again when the next-generation graphics cards debut. While we don't know for sure whether they'll be called 1100s, or 2000s, most people are assuming that 1180, 1170, etc., is the most likely.
Now new sources from Toms Hardware are suggesting that the release could be less than two months away. It claims that a number of anonymous people told it that the launch date for the new cards was mid-July, with partner cards following along a couple of months later.
We still don't know what kind of performance we can expect from these cards, though as we noted during a recent feature piece, there are some likely numbers we can draw from previous leaks and speculations. We're betting on 12GB of GDDR5X, though GDDR6 is a possibility. We're also expecting to see around Titan XP performance for the 1080, though some have suggested it could be greater than that considering the potential of a brand new architecture.
Either way, it may be that we don't have long to wait to learn more.
