Almost exactly a month ago, I talked about how AIBs will be seeded with NVIDIA's next-generation graphics cards, probably based on the Turing architecture, sometime in late August. This also meant that we would be able to see a launch sometime soon. Well, I have some more details to share that I was able to confirm with our sources intimately familiar with the matter.

NVIDIA's next-gen graphics cards details: First thing's first, naming convention and power details

You might have heard about the ongoing speculation about whether it's going to be NVIDIA GeForce GTX 11 or GTX 20 series and we can confirm that the company hasn't even told the AIBs that information yet. Here is the kicker though, not only is the prefix undecided but so is the suffix! I have been told that the company is actively considering suffixes like XXX5 so you get something like GTX 1170 and 1175 (or GTX 2070 and 2075).

So to make it easier to follow, let me break down NVIDIA's upcoming graphics card lineup according to the TDP brackets. The NVIDIA next-generation Turing lineup (I am just going to call it Turing going forward for want of a better term) will initially have 3 power brackets, 120W, 150W, and 180W. In increasing power and performance, these will be the three cards that NVIDIA is planning to launch in the near future.

Here is where the suffix uncertainty that I was talking about comes in as well. The 120W card could have the suffix 60/65/70, the 150W card could have the suffix 70/75/80 and the flagship 180W card could have an 80/85/90 suffix. While naming convention is not confirmed at this point we do know one thing for sure: NVIDIA does not plan to align the 120W next-gen Turing series GPU with the GTX 1060 at all and will charge accordingly.

NVIDIA Turing graphics card lineup pricing information

Here is where things get even more interesting, not only is NVIDIA planning not to align the 120W next-gen GPU with the GTX 1060 but they are planning to charge approximately twice as much as the 1060 for it. The good thing is, however, that this philosophy does not appear to be valid for the higher end lineups. These are the expected MSRPs that AIB and vendors have been informed of by NVIDIA:

The 120W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $499 MSRP.The 150W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $599 MSRP.The 180W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $699-749 MSRP.

At the same time,

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti MSRP will drop in price by $100.The GeForce GTX 1080 MSRP will drop in price by $50.

This would have very interesting implications for the market depth that NVIDIA is trying to tap into. Similar to what Intel is trying to achieve with mainstreaming the i9 segment and what AMD successfully achieved with Ryzen, NVIDIA is trying to expand the market depth and add on a higher priced segment to the same market. It appears that instead of entirely replacing the Pascal series, what they are trying to do is introduce a lineup that will fit snuggly on top of the same.

This would be in contrast to their philosophy before - which was usually a complete replacement of old cards. All things considered, this is good news for gamers, since they will now have more value at every price point. Unfortunately, however, we were also told that the manufacturing cost for these cards is barely below the MSRP so we might see cards sell significantly above the MSRP for quite some time.

Memory details of the initial next-gen lineup

Out of the three cards that NVIDIA will be launching soon, two will have 8GB of vRAM while the flagship will have 11 GB of vRAM. 11 GB of vRAM is a very odd choice and seems to indicate a bus width equal to 352-bits if general conventions are followed. We have previously seen a leak of an NVIDIA board with 12 GB vRAM and 384-bits and it is possible that this 180W is a derivative GPU of that card. Both the 150W and 120W next-gen GPUs will have 8GB of vRAM.

The 120W GB card having 8GB of vRAM is another example of NVIDIA differentiating the 120W variant from the GTX 1060 - which only has 6GB of vRAM.

Release schedule of the brand new graphics cards

I was also able to talk about the expected release schedule and my source seemed to confirm what has been stated for quite some time now - namely that the lineup will be following a staggered release schedule. As has been the case since the start, our source refused to call them by any particular name and wanted to only refer to them as the small, medium and big GPU so I will resort to the TDP naming convention once again.

Add in board partners and vendors of NVIDIA are expecting to have the SKUs stocked by the following dates, which is around the same time we should see them released:

The NVIDIA next-gen 120W GPU will be arriving at the end of September.The NVIDIA next-gen 150W GPU will be arriving by the second week of September.The NVIDIA next-gen 180W GPU will be arriving in the first week of September.

All in all, it looks like gamers can expect some new cards to play with soon enough. The one thing that our source talked about, however, was that NVIDIA will not have enough graphics cards to meet demand so expect the usual Amazon and eBay over pricing shenanigans before supply runs force the price to something more palatable.