Nvidia started off Gamescom 2018 with a bang by officially announcing the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti based on the long-rumoured Turing architecture.
Following the Ray Trace demo a few months ago on a monstrous $64,000 rig that featured 4x Nvidia Volta cards, we were able to get a glimpse into the future of CGI and gaming with dynamic reflections and lighting that help make virtual worlds feel that much more realistic.
The same demo was run on a single Turing card which helped to highlight the leap forward in technology that Nvidia has been developing in parallel for 10 years.
Nvidia RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti Release Date
The RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 are available for pre-order now and due to be released on September 20.
The 2070 doesn’t have a pre-order date at the moment. This is the card that will catch the eye of most consumers as it promises a massive performance jump despite being the baby of the new range, at a reasonable price considering the current state of the graphics card market.
Nvidia RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti Pricing
The prices for the cards announced at the event were as follows.
- Nvidia RTX 2070 – $499
- Nvidia RTX 2080 – $699
- Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti – $999
On Nvidia’s UK website you will be able to find Founders Editions of the 20 series for the following prices.
Various third-party versions of these cards can also be found on the Overclockers website.
The US pricing for the Founder’s Editions of the new cards according to Nvidia’s website:
Should you pre-order a card? We explain why you should wait.
Nvidia RTX 2080 Specs
Here are the main specs, and how they compare to the 1080 Ti and 1080:
RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 2080 | RTX 2070 | GTX 1080 Ti | GTX 1080 | |
CUDA cores | 4352 | 2944 | 2304 | 3584 | 2560 |
RT Cores (Giga Rays/sec) | 10 | 8 | 6 | 1.21 | 1* |
RTX-OPS | 78T | 60T | 45T | 12T* | 8T* |
VRAM | 11GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 11GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5X |
Memory Bus | 352-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit | 256-bit |
Memory Bandwidth | 616GB/s | 448GB/s | 448GB/s | 484GB/s | 352GB/s |
Base Clock | 1350MHz | 1515MHz | 1410MHz | 1480MHz | 1607MHz |
Boost Clock | 1545MHz | 1710MHz | 1620MHz | 1582MHz | 1733MHz |
TDP | 250W | 215W | 185W | 250W | 180W |
*estimated value
The performance gap between this new Turing generation and the older Pascal architecture is being advertised as nothing short of revolutionary.
The cards are based on the brand new platform which promises up to 6x the performance of the previous generatios, although that’s talking specifically about real-time ray tracing – the technology that has had the industry buzzing since Nvidia demonstrated it several months ago.
Real-time ray tracing is a massive step forward in lighting technology in games, allowing dynamic lighting to truly reflect the environment, providing realistic shadows, reflections and lighting effects in real-time.
The new GPUs are equipped with Tensor Cores that can provide over 100 TFLOPs of AI computing power,allowing the GPUs to create and run algorithms to make graphics sharper and more defined.
RTX 2080 Benchmarks
The first round of benchmarks are starting to appear for the RTX 2080, although it must be said that they should be taken with a pinch of salt
A gentleman from Thailand by the name of Tum Apisak has reported some 3DMark Time Spy results on his twitter account.
RTX 2080? ( NVIDIA Graphics Device 8GB ) Time Spy Gpu Score 10,030 https://t.co/wqRn8tt5QE
— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) 28 August 2018
This shows the RTX 2080 outpacing the 1080 Ti by 5%, and the 1080 by 35%. However, the core clock on the ‘Generic VGA’ card (which we can assume is the 2080) seems a little high at 2025MHz when the factory stock is advertised at 1800MHz. We will see how reliable these figures are pretty soon as more benchmark results will be flooding out over the next few weeks.
Nvidia has just released some internal benchmark results – probably to address concerns over the new cards’ performance in non-ray traced games. The graph below compares the RTX 2080 to the GTX 1080, but note that the bright green bars are the extra performance when DLSS is enabled in games. And not many games yet support this new technique. (It stands for deep learning super-sampling and is basically an alternative way to do anti-aliasing to smooth out jagged lines).
So, what can you take away from this? Well, four of the games here were run in HDR mode, and there’s no detail on which quality settings were used. However, it is possible to see that the RTX 2080 offers a fair chunk of extra performance even in current games, without ray tracing, DLSS or HDR.
The average performance gain appears to be 30-50 percent, and Nvidia says that all the new RTX cards will handle modern games in 4K at 60fps. But we’ll still have to wait and see how they perform in our own tests to know for sure.