NVIDIA Unveils GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 And RTX 2070, Shipping September 20th Starting At $499
After an epic week of leaks, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX family has finally been unveiled. There were no real surprises given that we've already seen the specs and various cards from OEM partners, but the new Turing family is no less impressive. As its name implies, the GeForce RTX cards are all about bringing real-time ray-tracing to gamers, allowing for more realistic scenes with proper lighting and shadowing effects for more accurate character and object models in games that will support the technology.
As expected, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the mack daddy of the family with its whopping 4,352 CUDA cores. The family is further fleshed out with the GeForce RTX 2080 (2,944 CUDA cores) and the GeForce RTX 2070 (2,304 CUDA cores). The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ships with 11GB of GDDR6 memory, while the lesser two entries are backed by 8GB of GDDR6.
In the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, memory bandwidth tops out at over 600GB/sec thanks to the 14Gbps GDDR6 that is in use. According to NVIDIA, Turing delivers over 6x the performance of Pascal (which was introduced over two years ago) and will usher in 60fps HDR gaming at 4K resolutions. That 6x performance claim, however, is in regards to ray tracing performance. With existing games and traditional rasterization techniques, Turing is not likely going to be orders of magnitude faster than Pascal.
While all of these new GeForce RTX GPUs support SLI, the connector has been replaced with NVLink, which provides a 100GB/sec link between the cards in multi-GPU configurations. Also new is the inclusion of VirtualLink, which is an all-new USB-C based [open] standard for connecting next-generation virtual reality headsets using a single cable for power/data.
As you can see below, there will be both reference and Founders Editions of all three cards available. NVIDIA's OEM partners will be building off the reference designs, while the Founders Edition cards will feature the same base clocks but higher boost clocks.
NVIDIA has ditched its blower-style cooling setup this time around and has decided to go with a more traditional dual-fan configuration. As we’ve seen in the plethora of leaks over the past few days, some of NVIDIA’s partners are using a triple-fan setup for their custom GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.
These Turing based GPUs pack 18.9 billion transistors, and there are three individual processing engines that help run the show: Turing SM (traditional shader engine), RT Core (ray-tracing engine), and the Tensor Core (AI engine). According to NVIDA CEO Jensen Huang, the Tensor Cores inside Turing are the equivalent of ten GeForce GTX 1080 Tis in AI operations. As for the RT Core, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti offers a 6x improvement in ray-tracing performance compared to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
While it's fine to talk a good game about ray-tracing and how it will revolutionize the gaming industry, it always helps to have a nice visual demo to give us an idea of that to expect in the real-world. In addition to its own-commissioned demos that gave us the basics on how ray-tracing moves the ball forward in gaming graphics, game developers have also provided in-game footage of the feature in action. Needless to say, the clips that we've seen of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield V and Metro Exodus looked gorgeous in their depictions of real-time ray tracing. You can see footage from all three games below:
The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are available for pre-order today, and will ship on September 20th. The former will be priced from $999, while the latter is priced from $699. The GeForce RTX 2070 will launch at a later date priced from $499. We should mention that the NVIDIA Founders Editions of these cards will ship at $1,199, $799, and $599.
