Nvidia may have a special edition graphics card just for the upcoming CD Projekt Red RPG, Cyberpunk 2077. Teased in what must have been a pre-planned Twitter flirtation between the two companies, the GPU appeared in a gaussian blur haze with some very familiar RTX-family stylings and what may well be some neon accents. The question is, is this a modified version of Nvidia’s existing 2000-series GPUs, or a hint of its next-generation Ampere cards?
Following the gargantuan success of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red’s next project is Cyberpunk 2077, a futuristic RPG with all sorts of exciting things going for it, including high-end visuals. That means it will be a demanding game on any graphics card, especially if gamers try out the RTX-driven ray-traced lighting. With no ray tracing alternative with AMD, though, that means Cyberpunk gamers who want the best looking experience will almost certainly need an Nvidia GPU. And Nvidia appears happy to oblige and encourage, in equal measure.
In a back and forth tweeting from Nvidia and CD Projekt Red, the game developer asked Nvidia if it planned to make a limited edition Cyberpunk GPU, to which Nvidia suggested it would think about it. When pressed, Nvidia responded that everyone should stay tuned. It also released a blurry image of a graphics card that looks very much like its Founders Edition RTX 2000 graphics cards. Where the cooler and shroud are the same as found on current Turing cards, the coloring is different, suggesting that this is a special edition Cyberpunk 2077 card, probably with some neon overtones in line with the color palette and retro-future of Cyberpunk’s setting.
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Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/wahUtfw3f6
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) February 16, 2020
The last time Nvidia made a special edition GPU was the Star Wars Titan XP, which came in both red and blue, in respect of the Sith and Jedi arms of that endless conflict. So we would expect any new special edition GPU to be also a high-end option. As WCCFTech speculates, it could be that this is the long-rumored RTX 2080 Ti super, which could be the last release of this generation of graphics cards before the Ampere 3000 series debuts later this year.
That said, Cyberpunk 2077 is due for release on September 17, so if this is a 2000-series Turing GPU, it wouldn’t leave much time in the year for a 3000-series release. Especially if earlier reports of 3000-series cards undercutting their 2000-series counterparts prove to be correct.
If the Cyberpunk 2077 Nvidia card is a special edition, or even Super, RTX 2080 Ti, it would be plenty powerful in its own right. WCCFTech has previously reported rumors of a Super 2080 Ti which had the same 4,608 CUDA cores as the Titan RTX, but faster 16GBps memory (versus 14Gbps in the existing 2080 Ti), and a higher boost clock of 1,770MHz. This would be effectively a Titan RTX with faster memory, which would make it the most capable gaming graphics card in the world. A perfect companion for a new generation of demanding RPG from CDPR.
But Cyberpunk 2077 would also be a strong launch title for Ampere GPUs, especially considering it’s been delayed multiple times and may well now coincide with the launch window for a next-generation of Nvidia graphics cards. Some early rumors for Ampere highlight how it will see Nvidia move from a 12nm process to a 7nm process, like AMD’s current-generation RX 5000-series GPUs. That alone could bring big performance and efficiency improvements, with some hinting at as much as a 70% uplift in overall GPU power versus the 2000-series.
That would be a near-unprecedented leap in performance, so we’d suggest remaining skeptical on that front for now. But either way, it appears that we could be seeing something particularly powerful debuting this September alongside Cyberpunk 2077.