14 DAY TRIAL // Drivers can be a great source of information on upcoming products, like PC components and other consumer electronics. This has been proven yet again by NVIDIA.
The people at LaptopVideo2Go have compiled a list of graphics cards that NVIDIA's new drivers support, or will support once the boards actually come out.
And that's the clincher: not all video cards on the list are up for order yet. Indeed, at least one of them is not a video card at all.
You might argue that it doesn't make sense, especially since, like the Titan-Z, the card in question has a processing unit and VRAM like any video board.
Things are compounded by the fact that the GPU is not Kepler-based, but powered by the Maxwell architecture, specifically the GeForce GM107.
Nevertheless, the board is not a graphics card. Instead, it is a GPU compute accelerator, part of the Tesla series. Its exact name is Tesla M40.
That's all anyone knows about it right now, since specification data is not included in driver support documentation.
It's worth noting that the M prefix has never been used before, since it stands for the Maxwell graphics architecture. On that note, Quadro graphics cards (professional video boards) will take on the M prefix as well.
In the meantime, Quadro and Tesla K-models, based on the Kepler micro-architecture, will continue to be developed and refined. One name of note is Tesla K80.
According to the report, this will be the strongest Tesla card yet, with a pair of Kepler-based GK110 graphics processing units. In fact, it is based on a PCB (printed circuit board) oddly similar to that of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan-Z dual-GPU graphics card. Again, no further specs are known.
The driver support list also mentioned a bunch of new cards, quite many of them too, but the device IDs above 1400 are a complete mystery. No one knows what the names will be when the video boards finally debut. Maybe the Maxwell GPU-based video line will make an early debut in the near future, even if it's just as a paper launch while availability is delayed until late 2014 or early 2015.
Either way, it's almost guaranteed that they are all, or most at least, based on a Maxwell graphics processor.
We may or may not learn more about NVIDIA's products and short-term plans in the wake of AMD's product releases on September 1 and 2 (AMD Radeon R9 285 Tonga and the first graphics-less FM2+ CPU).