Nvidia RTX 4080 could be here sooner than we thought – beating AMD to the punch

Nvidia could beat AMD to the punch by quite some distance when it comes to getting next-gen graphics cards to the market, or at least that’s what the latest rumor from a prominent leaker suggests.

Kopite7kimi on Twitter just dropped a brief – and admittedly somewhat unclear – tweet which seems to assert that Nvidia RTX 4000 GPUs will land early in Q3 (bear all the usual caveats around rumors in mind, naturally).

This is a follow-up to a tweet from last August in which Kopite7kimi said that Lovelace (presumably RTX 4000) graphics cards would emerge a “bit earlier” than thought, and the leaker now asserts they’ll arrive “Q3 early”.

Presumably that means early in the third quarter, which would seem to indicate July, the first month of Q3. However, maybe it could mean early August – which is still relatively early on, and certainly much sooner than previous rumors have suggested Lovelace will turn up. This could spell trouble for AMD, of course, in terms of RTX 4000 being able to establish a beachhead well before the arrival of RDNA 3 GPUs.

Another possibility regarding the meaning of this brief tweet is that it could simply reaffirm that Nvidia is going to hit a Q3 launch, and that is earlier than expected – but it’s a badly worded message if that’s the case. If so, this might point to a September launch at the end of Q3, but then again, September is a date we’ve already seen floated several times for the Lovelace launch, and this tweet would then hardly represent an update or new info.

So, that way of reading it doesn’t really make sense to us, which leads us back to the conclusion that RTX 4000 could debut before September, although there’s another question that must then be answered: are we looking at a paper launch? Or an actual cards-on-shelves timeframe?

Who knows, frankly, but if Kopite7kimi really is putting up the theory that even July might be a possibility for Nvidia’s plans, then we surely can’t be talking about on-sale dates, but maybe just a first initial reveal or teaser.

The leaker has not felt the need to clarify any of these questions, many of which have been raised in subsequent replies to the original tweet, so for now, we’ll exercise more skepticism than normal around this one, and classify it as one of the vaguer pieces of speculation we’ve seen on Lovelace.

What we can take from this – with a whole lot of caution – is a broad indication that Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards might be here a bit earlier than we thought, and that they could get the drop on AMD’s RDNA 3 offerings which may not appear until Q4 going by some rumors (although September has also been suggested as a date for the RX 7000 series to kick off).

Via Wccftech