At the recent SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, NVIDIA announced its new professional Quadro GPUs built around the new Turing architecture, which Nodal examined in our SIGGRAPH review. NVIDIA has also announced features and pricing for its consumer-level Turing-based GeForce GPUs: the RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti.
Intended as successors to the current GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti, the new RTX cards will benefit from one of Turing’s main selling points: built-in support for real-time ray tracing. Ray tracing can yield photorealistic results but is a tremendously computationally expensive, making it historically impractical for real-time applications. The Turing cards feature dedicated ‘RT cores’ to handle these computations, making true real-time ray tracing increasingly feasible. While it remains to be seen just how these cards perform in real-world scenarios, the initial looks are promising.
Performance has a price, and these new cards are no exception. The RTX 2070 retails starting at $499, with the RTX 2080 coming in at $699 and the RTX 2080Ti at $999. This is pricing for third-party cards; the NVIDIA-manufactured Founders Edition are priced at $599, $799, and $1,199, respectively (although it should be noted the FE versions do feature overclocked processors for greater clock speeds).
The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are slated to ship September 20, with pre-orders currently available. There is no announced release date as of yet for the RTX 2070.
For additional technical information and a look at production demos using the new Turing technology, check out Polygon’s announcement of the new cards.
Have a question on whether the new NVIDIA consumer cards can improve your 3D workflow? Feel free to ask Nodal!