NVIDIA just kicked off the GTC Autumn 2022 Keynote address that culminates in Project Beyond, the company's launch vehicle for its next-generation GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards based on the "Ada" architecture. These are expected to nearly double the performance over the present generation, ushering in a new era of photo-real graphics as we inch closer to the metaverse. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is expected to take center-stage to launch these cards.15:00 UTC: The show is on the road.15:00 UTC: AI remains the center focus, including how it plays with gaming.

NVIDIA in its latest "Project Beyond" hype video confirmed the new logo of GeForce RTX, the company's main gaming GPU brand. While the NVIDIA "eye" itself is unchanged, the "GeForce" part has a new typeface with uniform size for all letters. The video just about confirms that Project Beyond is about the next-generation RTX 40-series "Ada." NVIDIA is expected to unveil the series on Tuesday (20th September), at a special event as part of GTC, with a keynote address by CEO Jensen Huang.

NVIDIA has been dropping a trail of breadcrumbs in its GeForce twitter feed over the past week surrounding "Project Beyond," which from the get go was interpreted as its debut of the GeForce RTX 40-series, based on the "Ada" graphics architecture (named after Ada Lovelace, credited with being the mother of computer programming). In its latest tweet, the company posted a picture of the famous "Diagram for the computation by the Engine," believed to be a computer program she wrote for the Charles Babbage number engine (an analog computer from the early 19th century).

The teaser video shows a copy of Lovelace's chart lying on a modern PC desk. One of the two monitors has a sticky note with a phone number scribbled on it—(208)-629-7538. Punters on social media decoded this not to be a random phone number, but a well-crafted hint about the vital specs of the top GeForce RTX 4090. "208" could denote 2.08 times the performance (or at least FP32 compute throughput) of the RTX 3090 "Ampere." 629 could be the die-size in mm², and 7538 could mean 75.38 billion transistors (the rumored transistor count of the 5 nm "AD102" silicon on which the RTX 4090 is based).

NVIDIA in a cryptic tweet earlier this morning (evening September 7 in the US); teased something it calls "Project Beyond," with no further description. It comes with an animation showing a bunch of green rays projecting outward. We're inclined to believe Project Beyond is a marketing campaign leading up to the launch of the next-generation GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" graphics cards, given that it was tweeted from the NVIDIA GeForce handle, and not the main NVIDIA (corporate) handle. Intel used a similar overarching marketing campaign for the Arc "Alchemist" series, under "Odyssey." We should hear a lot more about NVIDIA's Project Beyond at the GTC conference slated for a little later this month.

Update 11:49 UTC: We're learning that NVIDIA is planning a GeForce-exclusive event on September 20.