Ahead of Nvidia's pre-Gamescom keynote on Monday, Internet retailers spilled the beans on the existence of the company's next consumer-grade graphics cards: the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.
Nearly an hour later, Nvidia unveiled its own product listings for "Founders" editions of the "20-series" video cards. The company confirmed a September 20 launch for those two models and a "coming later" notice for an additional RTX 2070. The prices for the Founders Editions are as follows: $599 for the RTX 2070; $799 for the RTX 2080, and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti. Pre-orders are live at the above Nvidia link.
Nvidia's event concluded by advertising prices "starting" at $499, $699, and $999, respectively, for those same modelspresumably referring to video card partners producing their own models outside Nvidia's own Founders Edition line.
The 2080 Ti Founders Edition will get you 11GB of GDDR6 RAM and a card running at a base clock of 1,350 MHz and a "boost" clock of 1,635 MHz. It will include 4,352 CUDA cores and 352-bit memory bandwidth running at 616 GB/sec. The more affordable 2080 Founders Edition actually clocks faster, at a "boost" clock of 1,800 MHz, but with 8GB of GDDR6 RAM. That memory operates with 256-bit bandwidth running at 448 GB/sec, and the card includes 2,944 CUDA cores.
Before that unveil, a massive Newegg product listing revealed pre-order options for both new cards from the usual graphics cards suspects: Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, and Zotac. Prices and specs didn't appear in this initial leak, but the page did include hard confirmation that the cards will ship with a bump to Nvidia's Turing chip architecture. That Newegg page has since been taken down, though it may be replaced as the Nvidia Gamescom event draws to a close.
According to Nvidia, this jump to Turing will usher in consumer-grade raytracing in real-time video games. Nvidia has been loudly trumpeting its interest in global illumination lighting systems and on delivering hardware that can make this rendering pipeline far more efficient ever since a major reveal at this year's Game Developers Conference. Among other things, these systems can deliver a far more realistic system of shadows and light sources that all bounce off each other.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Monday's Gamescom crowd that the Turing chip shipping in the consumer-grade RTX cards includes 18.9 billion transistors and that it includes three discrete processors: the Turing SM, the RT Core, and the Tensor Core. Huang said that the Tensor Core's focus on AI will allow newer RTX cards to predict and generate on-screen pixels as appropriate in a given 3D scene.
The Tensor Core is "basically ten 1080 Tis dedicated to doing one thing: artificial intelligence," Huang said. He insisted that all of the new RTX cards are optimized for overclockingyet they operate at "one-fifth the volume of a 1080 Ti" in terms of noise output.
Huang offered a list of PC games that will eventually receive RTX-minded patches, which includes Battlefield V, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. No date estimates were offered for any of these patches and updates.
Turing received a thorough unveil at last week's Siggraph Conference. That unveil was attached to the far pricier RTX Quadro line, whose cards cost as much as $10,000 and focus even more intensely on real-time raytracing. That higher-end product is targeted squarely at digital-imaging shops that want to cut down processing times for individual frames in Hollywood-caliber productions. During that unveil, key frames from a recent Marvel Studios film showed a far faster rendering process for a raytracing-filled scene with Spider-Man.