Nvidia's new 20-series RTX graphics cards bring real-time ray-tracing to high-end PCs

Cheapest GeForce RTX 2080 now on sale for £715

Nvidia's new 20-series graphics cards will offer real-time ray-tracing capabilities to ordinary PCs for the first time.

Launched at Gamescon in Berlin yesterday evening, Nvidia claims that the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 graphics cards, based on the Turing microarchitecture, will bring more realistic graphics capabilities and games to standard PCs.

However, buyers will have to dig deep - and wait a month or two.

The first cards available will be the Founders Editions of the GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - the two high end consumer/gaming graphics cards - for the price of $799 and $1,199 respectively. They will be available from about 20 September.

A GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition will be available a little later for $599.

Table (bordered)

Reference

CUDA cores

2304

2944

4352

Base clock

1,410MHz

1,515MHz

1,350MHz

Boost clock

1,710MHz

1,620MHz

1,800MHz

1,710MHz

1,635MHz

1,545MHz

Memory speed

14Gbps

Memory type

GDDR6

Standard memory

8GB

11GB

Memory interface

256-bit

352-bit

Memory bandwidth

448Gbps

616GB/s

The price of $1,199 will come with 11GB of fast GDDR6 video memory and a clock-speed of 1,635MHz, compared to the 1,545MHz of the Reference Edition GeForce RTX 2080 Tis. The $799 GeForce RTX 2080 will come with 8GB of video memory and come with a clock speed of 1,800MHz for the Founders Edition and 1,710MHz for plain vanilla 2080s.

Non-Founders Edition cards ought to cost about $100 less, Nvidia suggested, although Asus has revealed that its GeForce RTX 2080 will start at £889.30 in the UK, and its RTX 2080 TI will set buyers back £1,344.

Ebuyer, meanwhile, has a number of GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards available for between £715.98 and £1,339.98 - the budget-busting Asus GeForce RTX 2080 TI. Gigabyte, Evga, Zotax, Palit, PNY and Inno3d all have RTX 2808 Ti cards for between £924.99 and £1249.98. Aria, Overclockers, Scan, Box, Novatech are all also taking pre-orders.

Ray tracing effectively refers to the ability of a graphics card to accurately portray light - sunlight, artificial light and light from, for example, a fire in a fireplace in a game. That light might not be static, but could be the light from a torch, for example, carried by a character.

Ray tracing capabilities require an immense amount of mathematical compute power to accurately reflect and are one of the reasons why high-end graphics cards for creative professionals have historically cost so much.

In Nvidia's launch last night, the company demonstrated the difference that ray tracing capabilities should bring to games with, say, sunlight coming through a window being more accurately portrayed, enabling more atmospheric and realistic games to be produced. The ray tracing feature will plug-in to Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API.

The ray-tracing feature was trailed in March when Nvidia unveiled its RTX technology, and revealed that tools to take advantage of it had gone into early access in the company's GameWorks suite of development tools. Engines and other game developer tools supporting RTX include the Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite and Allegorithmic.

The 20-series graphics cards from Nvidia represent another big challenge to AMD, which has struggled to keep up with Nvidia in recent years.