Let The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 8GB Video Card Rumors Commence

NVIDIA’s next-generation flaghship single GPU powered graphics card is expected to be the GeForce GTX 880. Some are calling this the true successor to the GTX 680 as it will be based on the Maxwell architecture (the GM204 to be exact) and not the Kepler architecture like the GeForce 600 and most of the 700 series cards. Rumors about the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 have been circulating for months and if you type that phrase into Google you’ll come up with about 1.4 million results; albeit many are for the GeForce GTX 880M discrete graphics solution for notebooks.

The one rumor that caught our attention today was the one over in the ChipHell forums where a forum member stated that the GM204-A1 silicon was being made by TSMC on the 28nm manufacturing process and that it is successful, which sounds like they think it is in production. The GeForce GTX 880 is said to support DirectX 12 and that the cards will have 8GB of GDDR5 memory. The poster also said that the performance is about 110% of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and the GTX 880 will be priced $499 to $549 before taxes. This card is still a ways away and this is all just talk in a forum, but some of this information is getting pretty specific. The poster then goes on to say that NVIDIA is planning to do a shrink of the GM204 silicon that will likely be GM204-A2 by then down to the 20nm manufacturing process and release that GPU on cards like the GeForce GTX 970 in the second half of 2015.

The same poster on ChipHell later posted up what appears to be a shipping manifest of sorts that shows GM204 8GB GDDR5 test boards being listed to backup some of what they are saying. We did some Google searching of our own and found that they sourced this import export data from this site. The shipping list also mentions ‘GM204 Water Cooled Plunger’ and that is very interesting. Could NVIDIA be trying out water cooling GPU solution for their next generation flagship card?

The slide could be fake, but all we know is that the rumors are finally getting interesting and we felt like the community should be in the know! The rumors about GM204 with 8GB of GDDR5 memory were fun before, but we want to know what that water cooled plunger is. We also want to know if the GM204 will have 3200 CUDA cores and how wide the memory bus will be. The rumors have always said 256-bit, but we have no clue about any of that or when the GeForce GTX 880 release date will be.