Gamescom 2018 has been given an amazing start from Nvidia by announcing their new high-end graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. The next generation graphics cards were announced during a pre-Gamescom 2018 live stream from Cologne, Germany.
This puts an end to the plethora of rumors and speculations we have seen so far and finally makes the highly anticipated cards official. The new 20-series graphics cards are based on Nvidia’s new Turing architecture. These cards will be succeeding Nvidia’s current consumer flagship line, the GTX 10 series consisting of GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. Nvidia has also made an exception this time by announcing the more powerful Ti version at the same time as the standard variant.
Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, referring to the rumors on the internet, said, “everything on the web, every speck, is wrong.” Although, Nvidia’s own US website has already posted pictures and details of the new cards before the official announcement.
According to the listings on the website, the RTX 2070 will retail at $599 and the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti will cost $799 and $1,199 respectively. The new 20-series GPUs are expected to deliver up to 6 times the performance of the previous-generation graphics cards. Along with that, these new cards will feature built-in support for new real-time ray-tracing effects in the upcoming games.
Ray-tracing is a rendering and lighting technique used to create realistic graphics using real-time light reflections and cinematic effects. This technology has been used for visual effects in the film industry for a very long time but its intense computational requirements had made it impractical for gaming. The new cards get their names from Nvidia’s real-time ray tracing technology called Nvidia RTX. It was announced during the 2018 Game Developers Conference in March.
These GeForce 20-series GPUs will be made available from Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, PNY, MSI, and Zotac according to a Newegg promotion posted just before the keynote event. The Founder’s Edition cards will start shipping from September 20th and Nvidia is already taking pre-orders on its website.
