During NVIDIA's Gamescom 2018 press conference, the company officially revealed its next-gen graphics cards, the GeForce RTX Series. Based on the new NVIDIA Turing architecture and NVIDIA RTX platform, the RTX Series will fuse next-gen shaders with real-time ray tracing and new AI capabilities for an immersive gaming experience.
Arguably the biggest generational leap ever in gaming GPUs, Turing will reportedly deliver up to six times more performance than its predecessor, Pascal. The new RT Cores enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions, and global illumination. There's also Variable Rate Shading, which allows shaders to focus processing power on certain areas with rich detail, to boost performance.
The GeForce RTX Series will feature three models, the 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti. All models will use GDDR6 VRAM with more than 600 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 2070 and 2080 models will have 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, while the 2080 Ti will have 11GB of GDDR6 VRAM. In addition to outputs like DisplayPort and HDMI, the GeForce RTX Series will feature USB Type-C to support VirtualLink, a new open industry standard to meet the power, display, and bandwidth demands of next-gen VR headsets through a single USB Type-C connector. Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering, and VRWorks Audio will also improve the performance of VR applications.
Many game publishers and developers showed up at NVIDIA's Gamescom 2018 press conference to show that their game will take full advantage of the new GeForce RTX Series. Shadow of the Tomb Raider demonstrated realistic shadows and lighting at night, while Metro Exodus showed an accurate depiction of a dark room lit by sunlight through a window. Battlefield V went full Michael Bay in showing off the power of real-time ray tracing by having a bunch of explosions seen reflected on cars, tanks, the wet ground, windows, and even from the metal parts of the guns held by players.
NVIDIA will be releasing a Special Founders Edition for each of the GeForce RTX Series graphics cards and preorders go live today, August 20, 2018. Third-party partners, such as ASUS, MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte, PNY, ZOTAC, and more are also expected to provide custom GeForce RTX Series GPUs soon. The GeForce RTX Series 2080 and 2080 Ti Founders Editions will ship on September 20, 2018, while the GeForce RTX Series 2070 Founders Edition will be out in October.
If you've been waiting for a GPU to do 4K HDR gaming at 60 frames per second on the latest titles, this might be it. Are you excited for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX Series GPUs? Let us know in the Comments section, below.
