We've been waiting for what seems like an age to see Nvidia's next generation of GeForce graphics cards, but according to the rumor mill, they'll finally be unveiled next month. Speaking to TweakTown, a "well-placed source" in the industry said the first public showing would take place at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which begins on March 26.

The new cards will follow the current Pascal-based 10-series with either an 11-series or 20-series naming system, which means we could see the GTX 1180 or the GTX 2080. Whatever they're called, these new gaming GPUs are said to be based on the 12-nanometer Ampere architecture.

It was thought that the new GeForce cards would use the same Volta architecture found in the Titan V and Tesla V100, but it now looks as if Volta will be reserved for Nvidia's top-end cards built for AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and deep learning. Some suspect that Ampere could actually be a version of Volta for gamers.

Making the situation even more confusing is Turing, which Reuters calls "The new gaming chip" that is expected to be unveiled next month. This is a completely new GPU architecture and may be used in the GeForce GTX 11-Series/20-series cards instead of Ampere. It could, however, be for something else entirely.

Rumors have been floating around for a while that Turing is actually a code name for a new version of Nvidia's GPUs designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency. If this is true, it should help ease demand for gaming cards from miners and push down the exorbitant price of GPUs.

The new cards are expected to be released between late April and early May. Get ready to hear plenty more rumors in the run-up to GTC.