NVIDIA shares the start of the "Ultimate Countdown", which ends on August 31

NVIDIA has started an Ultimate Countdown for something, although it is yet to say for what exactly. The countdown has been shared on NVIDIA's social media channels and includes the text "THE #ULTIMATECOUNTDOWN 21 DAYS. 21 YEARS." along with a short video showing some sort of cosmic explosion. 21 days from today is August 31, which will be the 21st anniversary of the GeForce brand. The first card that NVIDIA released under its GeForce brand was the GeForce 256, which referred to the card's four 64-bit pixel pipelines that the company called a "256-bit QuadPipe Rendering Engine".

While NVIDIA announced the GeForce 256 in August 1999, it did not release the SDR version until October 11, which it then followed with the DDR model in December of the same year. Fast forward almost 21 years, and NVIDIA has improved a long way on the 220 nm process that it used for the GeForce 256.    

Presumably, today's teaser is the first of several leading up to an RTX 3000 series announcement on August 31. GamersNexus has reported that NVIDIA will release cards like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti on September 9, which may well still be the case. August 31 could be the date when NVIDIA unveils its Ampere-based cards, while September 9 may be the date when the company starts accepting orders. AIB cards would then likely follow a few weeks later.