Nvidia's new RTX 2000 series graphics cards made waves when they were unveiled recently for all sorts of reasons. They looked vastly different to their predecessors with a dual-fan cooler for even the Founders Edition. They were packed with new hardware like RT Cores and Tensor Cores, allowing for ray tracing and deep learning super sampling games for outstanding visuals. Nvidia also made claims of huge performance gains with the new cards too, trouncing the 10-series -- or so it said.
But these new cards are expensive, often hundreds of dollars more than their last-generation counterparts debuted at and much more even now as those cards have come down in price.
So the question remains, should you buy them now or when they release on September 20?
Wait for the performance numbers
At the very least, you shouldn't buy anything before we find out how these cards actually perform. Nvidia's benchmarks have been far from conclusive and are certainly biased in favor of the new hardware, so third-party results are a must. Even the earliest hints of those so far contain suggestions of heavy overclocking, which is a little disingenuous.
The new features lack widepsread support
Even if the performance numbers for the new cards do look good enough when they arrive, it's important to remember that the new features like ray tracing and DLSS have very limited support so far. Between them less than 25 games will support them over the next six months and even in a couple of years we will likely only have a handful of games that support both.
By that point newer hardware which is better able to take advantage of the new features will be available so why not just wait for that?
The price is ridiculous
Nvidia has been well known for pushing prices up when it lacked competition and that's the case again today. It can afford to raise the launch prices of its graphics cards to ridiculous levels because it knows AMD has no direct competition. On top of that, it knows cryptocurrency miners and AI developers will buy up tonnes of the cards soo, so it will not be missing out on any business with such high prices.
Whether you want to support such practices in the name of a few frames is up to you.
Conclusion
So, should you buy these cards? Not yet at least and if you have a GTX 10-series graphics card, probably not either. These new GPUs are absurdly expensive, lack great support for their new features and may only be a little better than the cards that came before.
I may be wrong, but you should wait to prove that before putting down your money on this unproven tech.
