Nvidia to release GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 at the end of September

Nvidia officially announced the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 at its GeForce Gaming Event. The video cards are based on the Turing architecture and contain RT cores for ray tracing. Tickets will be on sale from September 20.

Nvidia has put all the information about the GeForce RTX graphics cards on its website and the manufacturer’s reference designs are available to order from now on. The new video cards get a cooler with two fans, which means Nvidia differs from its previous coolers with one radial fan. According to Nvidia, the new cooler is much quieter, with noise production being one-fifth that of a GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX video cards feature a Turing GPU, whose architecture the company presented last week along with three Quadro RTX video cards for workstations. The consumer versions have fewer Cuda cores and less gddr6 memory than their professional counterparts. Nvidia has not yet given all the details about the GPUs of the consumer cards, but at the presentation the manufacturer showed a Turing GPU with 14tflops of processing power. Presumably that is the GPU with 4352 Cuda cores that is in the RTX 2080 Ti. The full GPU in the most expensive Quadro version has 4608 Cuda cores and is good for 16 tflops.

The RTX 2080 Ti has a GPU with 4352 Cuda cores. Nvidia cites boost clock speed of 1635MHz with overclock, or 1545MHz for a reference model. The RTX 2080 has 2944 Cuda cores, but they are clocked higher: 1800MHz for an oc version, or 1710MHz for a reference model. The cheapest RTX card that Nvidia is now announcing is the RTX 2070 with 2304 Cuda cores. The Founders Edition with overclock has a boost speed of 1710MHz, the reference speed of this model is 1620MHz.

The RTX 2080 and 2070 are known to have a smaller GPU with fewer Cuda cores. There is also a difference in RT cores, because according to Nvidia the 2080 does 8 Giga Rays per second and for the RTX 2070 that is 6 Giga Rays. The RTX 2080 Ti achieves 10 Giga Rays per second, which is equivalent to the most expensive RTX Quadro card.

The addition of the RT cores should enable real-time ray tracing in games. How that is applied will vary from game to game. Nvidia demonstrated several games with RTX support, including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus and Battlefield V. The games are not fully rendered with ray tracing, but the RTX platform is used for certain shadow or light effects.

Furthermore, the GeForce RTX cards have Tensor Cores for artificial intelligence. That should also be applied in games, according to Nvidia, for example, it can be used for upscaling and anti aliasing techniques. Nvidia has come up with a new name for the combination of the performance of all the different cores: rtx-ops. The top model, the RTX 2080 Ti, is good for 78 tera RTX ops, the RTX 2080 scores 60 tera RTX ops and the RTX 2070 scores 45 tera RTX ops.

Nvidia has not shown any benchmarks of the new GPUs compared to their predecessors. It is not yet known how much speed gain there is for the RTX cards in games that do not use ray tracing. Apart from the additions of the RT and Tensor cores, the GPU architecture of Turing is probably similar to Pascal.

The RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 are equipped with an NVLink connector, which replaces the SLI connection. Just like with SLI, two video cards can be combined via NVLink. To do that, a bridge has to be purchased, which costs 79 dollars. The RTX 2070 lacks this option.

Nvidia sells Founders Editions of the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 for 1249, 849 and 639 euros respectively. This makes the new video cards considerably more expensive than their predecessors. However, Nvidia mentioned prices starting at 999, 699 and 499 dollars for the three RTX cards in its presentation. Those prices probably apply to the cheapest versions from other manufacturers.