Analyst: NVIDIA's next-gen GPU will boost gaming revenue, big time

NVIDIA will be launching its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture this year, where we should see the new GPU introduced at NVIDIA's own GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in March 2020. But what about the gaming side of things? I've also got some rumored specs on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card here.

Well, according to analysts at Citibank, the semiconductor market is going to be strong throughout 2020. Harsh Kumar from Citibank writes: "In our view, 2020 appears to be a major recovery year for the semiconductor market. Inventory levels are low across the board, and with a soothing trade narrative, we expect a strong pick-up in demand".

After the cryptocurrency mining boom and subsequent bust, NVIDIA was left with a ton of graphics cards on the market just as they ramped into the launch of the Turing GPU architecture and GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics cards. Sales were not too strong, and while they did sell well -- it was not as well-received with gamers as the Pascal-based GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards.

We should expect a big uptick in graphics card sales with Ampere, which will see NVIDIA using the new 7nm node that AMD has been on since early-2019 with its Radeon VII, and continued through with on their new Navi-based Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards.

NVIDIA will have a monster year this year riding a new GPU architecture, a slew of new graphics cards and fighting off a newly-focused AMD with Big Navi coming later this year. I don't think Intel is a worry (yet) but the DG1 graphics card will create some buzz, but it won't touch NVIDIA anywhere near a level of concern (yet).