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Nvidia unveils powerful new RTX 2070 and 2080 graphics cards

Welcome to Nvidia’s next generation of gaming graphics

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Samit Sarkar (he/him) is Polygon’s deputy managing editor. He has more than 15 years of experience covering video games, movies, television, and technology.

Nvidia’s new high-end graphics cards are the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the company announced today during a pre-Gamescom 2018 livestream from Cologne, Germany.

These new 20-series cards will succeed Nvidia’s current top-of-the-line GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. While the company usually waits to launch the more powerful Ti version of a GPU, this time around, it’s releasing the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at once.

They won’t come cheap. The Nvidia-manufactured Founders Edition versions will cost $599 for the RTX 2070, $799 for the RTX 2080 and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti. The latter two cards are expected to ship “on or around” Sept. 20, while there is no estimated release date for the RTX 2070. Pre-orders are currently available for the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced different “starting at” prices during the keynote presentation. Huang’s presentation said the RTX 2070 will start at $499, the RTX 2080 at $699 and the RTX 2080 Ti at $999. Asked for clarification, an Nvidia representative told Polygon that these amounts reflect retail prices for third-party manufacturers’ cards.

You can see the base specifications for the three graphics cards below.

Nvidia RTX 2070

Spec RTX 2070 FE RTX 2070 GTX 1070
Spec RTX 2070 FE RTX 2070 GTX 1070
GPU architecture Turing Turing Pascal
Boost clock 1710 MHz (OC) 1620 MHz 1683 MHz
Frame buffer 8 GB GDDR6 8 GB GDDR6 8 GB GDDR5
Memory speed 14 Gbps 14 Gbps 8 Gbps
Source: Nvidia

Nvidia RTX 2080

Spec RTX 2080 FE RTX 2080 GTX 1080
Spec RTX 2080 FE RTX 2080 GTX 1080
GPU architecture Turing Turing Pascal
Boost clock 1800 MHz (OC) 1710 MHz 1733 MHz
Frame buffer 8 GB GDDR6 8 GB GDDR6 8 GB GDDR5X
Memory speed 14 Gbps 14 Gbps 10 Gbps
Source: Nvidia

Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti

Spec RTX 2080 Ti FE RTX 2080 Ti GTX 1080 Ti
Spec RTX 2080 Ti FE RTX 2080 Ti GTX 1080 Ti
GPU architecture Turing Turing Pascal
Boost clock 1635 MHz (OC) 1545 MHz 1582 MHz
Frame buffer 11 GB GDDR6 11 GB GDDR6 11 GB GDDR5X
Memory speed 14 Gbps 14 Gbps 11 Gbps
Source: Nvidia

The RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti will be the first consumer-level graphics cards based on Nvidia’s next-generation Turing architecture, which the company announced earlier this month at the SIGGRAPH computing conference. At that time, Nvidia also revealed its first Turing-based products: three GPUs in the company’s Quadro line, which is geared toward professional applications.

All three of the new RTX cards will feature built-in support for real-time ray tracing, a rendering and lighting technique for photorealistic graphics that gaming companies are starting to introduce this year. Nvidia announced a real-time ray tracing technology that it refers to as Nvidia RTX — hence the new naming scheme for the company’s upcoming GPUs — during the 2018 Game Developers Conference in March. Ray tracing is the standard for applications such as visual effects in the film industry, but it is extremely computationally intensive, which has meant that — at least until now — it has been impractical for gaming. In addition to real-time ray tracing, Nvidia’s RTX platform incorporates two existing technologies, programmable shaders and artificial intelligence.

Huang’s keynote featured a number of demonstrations and presentations to illustrate the potential of Nvidia RTX. The company itself produced an RTX tech demo, “Project Sol,” consisting of a cinematic scene rendered with real-time ray tracing on a Quadro RTX 6000:

A few game makers also appeared on stage to show off Windows PC games launching in the next six months or so that will support Nvidia RTX. EA DICE showed new footage of Battlefield 5 with RTX-based reflections; 4A Games showed RTX-based lighting in Metro Exodus; and Eidos Montreal showed RTX-based shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Update (2:15 p.m. EDT): The prices for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series cards have been updated per Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Gamescom keynote.

Update 2 (3:25 p.m. EDT): We’ve updated the article with demonstrations of Nvidia RTX that the company showcased during its Gamescom event.

Update 3 (3:56 p.m. EDT): We’ve updated the article with a pricing clarification from Nvidia.

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