Nvidia officially unveiled its new-generation of 2000-series graphics cards yesterday and although the numbers and demonstrations that Gamescom attendees were shown were high and impressive, the pricing for these cards could put them well out of the reach of most gamers for some time to come and we still don't know if that additional cost will be worth it in the short term.
The GTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti will all become available by September 20 2018, and represent a major shift in the graphics architecture of Nvidia's GPUs. It's a design that's been under development for a decade, we're told, offering high-end performance for AI deep learning scenarios and ray tracing technology. Indeed we're told that these GPUs can handle ray tracing at a speed that's 10 times that of previous generation graphics cards -- even high end offerings like the 1080 Ti.
That's great news, as ray tracing is considered by many, to be the lighting holy grail of computing. Certainly, the demos of games like Battlefield 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider look impressive, but how do these cards perform in existing games or titles that don't make use of ray traced lighting?
We have absolutely no idea. Nvidia steered well clear of traditional benchmarks or even talking about the general performance of these new GPUs when compared with older Nvidia cards or AMD GPUs. It could well be that like most graphics generational leaps, the new Nvidia cards are 10-20 percent faster at general gaming and are simply great at ray tracing. Think Nvidia hairworks -- it's something that some games may use, while others won't bother.
Nvidia RTX cards can be pre-ordered now for $600 for the 2070, $750 for the 2080, and $1200 for the 2080 Ti with some variation by manufacturer.
