Based on the timing of previous years’ launches, we would have expected Nvidia’s next-gen architecture to arrive in late 2024, but it now looks like there will be no such successor until early 2025.
The first high-end GPUs in the Geforce RTX 4000 series, based on the ‘Ada Lovelace’ architecture, were revealed in late 2022. Nvidia’s previous ‘Ampere’ (RTX 3000) generation launched in 2020 – and this 24-month cadence goes back more than a decade, give or take a few months.
A new roadmap revealed alongside results from the ML Commons Training benchmark for AI models – and reported by German hardware site HardwareLuxx – points to a longer wait before the Lovelace/RTX 4000 successor arrives.
According to this presentation, the next generational jump for the company’s gaming GPUs will happen in two years at the earliest. Before that, Nvidia will launch the enterprise products Grace and Grace Hopper, which may be expected to take the lead in the CPU and “superchip” segments. These chips are designed to fuel Nvidia’s HPC (high-performance computing) and AI supercomputing ambitions.
Grace Hopper has been showcased in the form of the Nvidia DGX GH200 – an AI supercomputer that combines 256 Grace Hopper chips and a gargantuan 144 TB of shared memory for extremely large AI models. After that, in what looks like the second half of 2024, Nvidia turns its focus to Hopper-Next or “Blackwell,” as this enterprise GPU architecture appears to be labeled.
An RTX 4000 Refresh Might Arrive First
With the exception of ‘Ada Lovelace-Next’, all of the circuitry mentioned in the roadmap is aimed at the enterprise market and data centers. That no gaming-oriented GPU architecture is to succeed Lovelace/RTX 4000 before 2025 deviates from Nvidia’s usual launch schedule, which has been as follows:
- Kepler (most GeForce 600 and most 700-series GPUs): April 2012
- Maxwell (some GeForce 700, and most 900-series GPUs): February 2014
- Pascal (GeForce 10 series): May 2016
- Turing (GeForce RTX 20 and GTX 16 series): September 2018
- Ampere (GeForce RTX 30 series): May 2020
- Ada Lovelace (GeForce RTX 4000 series): October 2022
The time window between Ampere to Ada Lovelace was admittedly a bit longer than usual at 30 months. If this trend is followed into the future, that 30-month wait for ‘Ada Lovelace-Next’ or RTX 5000 would indeed stretch into early 2025 – if this is what the roadmap intends to show.
So far there have been no other signs of an RTX 5000-series successor to Ada Lovelace and the RTX 4000 series. Most recent Nvidia-related rumors are projections of what Nvidia might be planning in the data center space, which has been taken as a new direction for the company and a lesser focus on gaming graphics.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that Nvidia has more new products in store other than additional mid-range and mainstream graphics cards. A GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or Titan could be in the works, and perhaps in late 2023 or 2024, a refresh of the RTX 4000 series much like with the previous-gen ‘Super’ cards.
Another possibility is cut-down versions of the current flagships to further compete with AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and 7900 XT, as well as upcoming RX 7800 and RX 7700 cards. Such models could be upgraded with, for example, additional VRAM (graphics memory), which has been one of the main complaints pertaining to the RTX 4000 lineup.
