If you've been watching the parade of lackluster RTX 40-series reviews and thinking, "I'll just get the 50-series in 2024," that is not going to happen. The company has released a new roadmap that clearly states that whatever comes after its current Ada Lovelace architecture won't appear until 2025. This is a clear deviation from its two-year cadence between new architectures. Though that might be bad news for folks not impressed with the 40-series, it does open the door to new "Ada" GPUs in 2024, possibly with Super or Ti branding.
Nvidia made the announcement at a recent event highlighting its AI achievements, according to Tweaktown. The company displayed a roadmap for the first time showing how its architectures would scale over time, with them all getting a "next" version in the future. For Ada Lovelace, that translates to "Lovelace Next" in 2025, which is reportedly code-named Blackwell. This is a surprising development simply because Nvidia has been able to hit its two-year cadence for all of its past launches, and given how rapidly technology is progressing, anything longer than that seems like a gamble. Still, it launched Ada in 2022, Ampere in 2020, and Turing in 2018, so the pattern is quite clear.
That said, Nvidia has left several gaping holes in its lineup, which it will surely plug before the next-gen arrives. The most glaring example is the yawning chasm between the RTX 4080 and 4090, both in price ($400) and performance. You can take it to the bank there will be an RTX 4080 Ti at some point, but the RTX 4090 Ti remains a question mark. There's also a $200 gap between the RTX 4070 and the Ti version, leaving room for a Super variant. Beyond that, there's already a 4060 Ti and 4060, but since the x60 cards are the real volume cards, we wouldn't be surprised to see a Super appear, possibly with a wider memory bus and 12GB of VRAM at some point.
We'll likely never get an official reason from Nvidia for the change of cadence, but it could be due to the lack of pressure from AMD. The company is oddly absent in some GPU categories, having had zero response to any of Nvidia's 4070 GPUs, which would typically be the 7800 and 7700 XT. Nvidia will also probably utilize TSMC's 3nm process for what comes next. That node is likely not even in full production yet, and it will be costly compared with the N5 process it's currently using. Therefore, Nvidia might be waiting for prices to go down while yields go up, although 2025 is a long way off still, and Nvidia has a lot of cash.
Also, this updated roadmap differs from the previous version Nvidia released, which showed the Ada Lovelace successor arriving in 2024. The roadmap was posted back in 2021 by Wccftech and shows "Ampere Next Next" targeting a 2024 release date. Something has changed within Nvidia to push this timing back.
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