The spread of COVID-19 or novel coronavirus has turned 2020 into a year of cancelations, economic instability, and panic. As countries around the globe struggle to contain the new disease amid thousands of deaths, the crisis has wreaked havoc on the world economy as stocks and futures dive. Companies across various economic sectors revise their plans for conventions and in-person announcements as more and more countries go on lockdown as well.
The effects of the spread of COVID-19 have been pretty bad. With E3 2020 and various other events, all being postponed or outright canceled; and with other events like TennoCon 2020 moving to an all-digital presentation, the impacts are pretty clear. The prices of goods within the gaming space and other sectors of the global economy have been increasing as well. PC component prices have been on a steady increase over the last few weeks, and various console makers are predicting eventual shortages of accessories and consoles.
In a post on the company’s official blog entitled “GTC News Can Wait”, Nvidia revealed that the company is postponing a variety of product announcements they previously had planned for the coming months. Nvidia had already announced that the event, announced that its GTC (GPU Technology Conference), would be a digital-only presentation to avoid exposing a live audience to the new virus.
“We’re going to hold off on sharing our GTC news for now,” the company said. “That way, our employees, partners, the media and analysts who follow us, and our customers around the world can focus on staying safe and reducing the spread of the virus.” Going further, the company iterated a pro-worker stance, and that family comes first in these uncertain times. “This is a time to focus on our family, our friends, our community,” Nvidia said. “Our employees are working from home. Many hourly workers will not need to work but they’ll all be fully paid.”
What was delayed?
That’s the question on everyone’s mind this week, as the PC gaming crowd wonders what they could be missing out on. There are a lot of ideas floating around this week as people try to figure out what Nvidia had planned for 2020 and beyond. the RTX 3000-series of graphics cards were pretty high up on that list, and it’s clear that AMD was in a much more competitive state after their successes against Intel in the CPU market this past year.
Some potential leaks have suggested that the new tier of GPUs would have been a major upgrade over the current frontrunner from the green team, the 2080 Ti. Some sources suggest that the GA102 (unofficial name) being up to 40% faster than the RTX 2080 TI.
