At Siggraph, Nvidia announced its RTX cards for professional content creators, based on the new Turing GPU architecture. (Nvidia Changes the Game in Ray Tracing) Now it has released three versions for consumers and keen game players in its GeForce range and they start at $499. There are three versions, the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 are now available for pre-order and will start shipping on 20th September apart from the RTX 2070 which will ship in October.
Game support will initially come from 21 new games and will be fitted with dual fans and graphics resolution suport is up to 8K HDR via DisplayPort 1.4a and with support for VirtualLink for VR. The new cards are said to be able to support UltraHD gaming with HDR at 60fps and like the professional versions will support the NVLink adaptor that allows the running of multiple GPUs. There will be ‘Founders Edition’ cards available from Nvidia directly.
The cards have a new memory system that supports GDDR6 at over 600GB/s. Memory is as follows.
| GeForce GPU | Ray Tracing | Performance* | Memory | Starting At | Founders Edition | ||
| RTX 2080 Ti | 10 GigaRays/sec | 78T RTX-OPS | 11GB | $999 | $1,199 | ||
| RTX 2080 | 8 GigaRays/sec | 60T RTX-OPS | 8GB | $699 | $799 | ||
| RTX 2070 | 6 GigaRays/sec | 45T RTX-OPS | 8GB | $499 | $599 | ||
Games that support ray tracing will include:
- Assetto Corsa Competizione from Kunos Simulazioni/505 Games
- Atomic Heart from Mundfish
- Battlefield V from EA/DICE
- Control from Remedy Entertainment/505 Games
- Enlisted from Gaijin Entertainment/Darkflow Software
- Justice from NetEase
- JX3 from Kingsoft
- MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
- Metro Exodus from 4A Games
- ProjectDH from Nexon’s devCAT Studio
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes
Other games will support the Deep Learning Super-Sampling technology to improve visual performance.
MSI, among others, announced support for the platform with a new series of cards.
MSI’s GeForce RTX 2080 Series includes liquid cooling options
Analyst Comment
I haven’t been a gamer for ten years or so, but I must admit that the quality of the graphics from the Turing GPU with one of the latest HDR monitors have made me wonder if it would be fun to try it again! Just as we went to press, I got this quote from uber-gamer and Display Monitor friend, Jon Peddie…
“The new RTX-based add-in boards (AIBs) may cause gamers to get killed more often in the newer games. They will be so stunned by the beautiful ray traced images they won’t be paying enough attention to the enemies and, well, they will die, but with a smile on their face”.
VirtualLink is a new Alt-mode for USB Type-C that supplies enough bandwidth for four HBR3 DisplayPort lanes (scalable for the future) and up to 27W of power. Supporters include Nvidia, Valve, Oculus, Microsoft and AMD. One of the challenges for VR headsets is that the interface needs enough data bandwidth to transmit sensor data (including feeds from cameras) back to the host system as well as supporting the dual displays.
We have heard that the consortium is looking at ways to allow consumers to easily identify VirtualLink connections. (BR)
The VirtualLink logo
