If you've been holding out hope for a Pascal-powered version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, you might want to skip your afternoon coffee. Nvidia sent out invitations today to a "GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration" event in San Francisco on February 28 during the Game Developers Conference. The invitation to the event talks about "amazing surprises," and ends with a seemingly-portentous "you won't want to miss this" declaration. To be clear, there's nothing explicitly mentioned in the invitation other than "an evening of awesome PC gaming, hardware, tournaments, and of course free food." That doesn't stop us from imagining what will happen, though, and the office betting pool is running good odds on an unveiling of the rumored GTX 1080 Ti.
Nvidia has a history of launching new graphics cards at relatively innocuous events, and it's been a while since the GeForce GTX 1080 first saw the light of day. Ever since the Kepler architecture, Nvidia has released the high-end cards first, and let loose the range-topping enthusiast-class card much later. The timing is also suspiciously close to the rumored launch date of AMD's new Ryzen CPUs. AMD and Nvidia are bitter rivals, and it wouldn't be the first time that one of these companies tried to steal the other's thunder. Suffice to say, the time is ripe for such an announcement.
It's difficult to imagine anyone being dissatisfied with the performance of the GeForce GTX 1080, but there are always folks chomping at the bit for bigger and faster cards. The $1200 price tag on the Pascal Titan X is a dear one for something with performance not that far ahead of a card at half that price. The fabled GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (rumored to be based on a cut-down version of the GP102 chip used in the Titan X) could offer a significantly improved value over the Titan card. Previous rumors about the existence of the GP102 have all fallen flat, but this time there might be some meat to the story. We'll know in just two weeks.