After many months of teasing and potential leaks, we’re now officially on the home stretch when it comes to Nvidia’s next-gen gaming GPUs. A short teaser trailer posted to the NVIDIA GeForce YouTube channel early this morning sets a date of August 20 for the unveiling of its new gaming-grade graphics cards. All signs point toward the RTX 2080.
Keen-eyed readers will know that August 20 is the same week Gamescom – Europe’s answer to E3 – kicks off in Cologne, Germany. Confirmed yet again through the aforementioned video, Nvidia plans to showcase the new tech at its own event in the city.
The first card to be revealed looks set to be the RTX 2080, dropping the GTX branding used on Nvidia’s gaming-grade graphics cards since the days of the 200-series cards based on the Tesla architecture from back in 2008. Cards ending with 80 are typically high-end gaming GPUs with more affordable options arriving as the months go on.
As for the tech powering these new cards, we’ve heard rumblings about the newest line of Nvidia GPUs for some time now. But with the company formally announcing the long-rumored ‘Turing’ name for its new GPU architecture at SIGGRAPH 2018 yesterday, we’re a step closer to understanding what its next line of gaming-grade GPUs will bring to the average consumer’s desktop rig in the near future.
And what they’re expected to bring stems from the RTX namesake. The focus of yesterday’s Nvidia event was to introduce ‘ray tracing’ to its GPU line-up. A key focus of these next-gen GPUs, ray tracing is a technique designed to increase the realism of lighting effects. With the tech set to be supported by Nvidia’s latest GPUs, game developers will be able to implement better lighting throughout their titles.
Alongside other technologies like Compute and AI improvements, the new Turing architecture cards signify the “greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006,”. Nvidia used the event to showcase the Quadro RTX cards; the first GPUs built on the new Turing architecture.
The Quadro name typically applies to cards designed for professional and industrial workloads and carry a hefty price tag. And these products are no different with the low-end Quadro RTX 5000 costing $2,300 and the top-end $10,000 Quadro RTX 8000. As usual, Nvidia will even offer a Quadro RTX Server with eight Turing GPUs wedged inside.
