A 3DCenter.org report shed light on what NVIDIA's GPU lineup for 2013 could look like. According to the report, NVIDIA's next-generation GPUs could follow a similar path to previous-generation "Fermi Refresh" (GF11x), which turned the performance-per-Watt equation around back in favor of NVIDIA, even though the company's current GeForce Kepler has an established energy-efficiency lead. The "Kepler Refresh" family of GPUs (GK11x), according to the report, could see significant increases in cost-performance, with a bit of clever re-shuffling of the GPU lineup.

NVIDIA's GK104 GPU exceeded performance expectations, which allowed it to drive this generation's flagship single-GPU graphics card for NVIDIA, the GTX 680, giving the company time to perfect the most upscaled chip of this generation, and for its foundry partners to refine its 28 nm manufacturing process. When it's time for Kepler Refresh to go to office, TSMC will have refined its process enough for mass-production of GK110, a 7.1 billion transistor chip on which NVIDIA's low-volume Tesla K20 GPU compute accelerator is currently based.