Nvidia RTX 2080, 2080 Ti, And 2070 Prices And Release Date Revealed

At Gamescom 2018, Nvidia held a press conference to announce and detail its next generation of video cards. It revealed the GeForce RTX 2070 ($500 USD), RTX 2080 ($700), and RTX 2080 Ti ($1000), all of which will launch on September 20, 2018. These new cards use the Turing GPU architecture and boast the ability to perform ray tracing technology (or RTX for short, hence the card names). The first of them is already available for pre-order ahead of their launch next month.

Nvidia's presentation included live in-game demonstrations of ray tracing in action from Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus, Assetto Corsa, and Battlefield V. In short, ray tracing technology is capable of more realistic global illumination and accurate projections of ambient light, and affords the ability to efficiently calculate the reflections and light sources that exist outside of the screen space. For ray tracing specifically, the Turing architecture is four times faster than Volta-based workstation GPUs and ten times faster than the current Pascal GTX 10-series--not to be confused with overall performance outside of ray tracing.

It’s been over two years since the current generation of Nvidia’s graphics cards were released. The GTX 10-series (Pascal) first hit the market in May 2016 with intermittent releases of different models afterward. AMD released its RX Vega line of cards in August last year, which competed with the GTX 10-series.

Pre-orders are live for both the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at retailers like Nvidia's website and Amazon. Those eager to get their hands on one of the new cards as soon as possible may want to place an order now, as it's unclear how limited supply might be in the wake of launch.

You can get a small taste of what to expect from real-time ray tracing in the video below, which shows it both enabled and disabled in Battlefield V.