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NVIDIA launches the GeForce RTX 20 series of cards

by: John - posted: 8/20/2018 2:10:00 PM
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NVIDIA made a huge, huge splash at Gamescom today with the announcement of their new lines of cards. At SIGGRAPH, they announced the Turing Architecture and ushered in the real time ray tracing. What some say is the "Holy Grail" of graphics, ray tracing takes a ton of computational power, but produces incredible pictures. Needless to say, this was a major emphasis in today's presentation along with the new cards.

Working with Microsoft, they implemented DXR or DirectX ray tracing and then they worked with Epic to incorporate DXR into the Unreal engine. You may have seen the Star Wars ray tracing demo, which is just unbelievable. The reflections, illuminations, details in both Captain Phasma and the Stormtroopers make an incredibly looking realistic video. It took 4 Volta GPUs in a $68,000 deep learning super computer to produce this video.

Powering the new cards is Turing which was 10 years in the making. This beast has 18.9 billion transistors with a Turing SM, the Tensor Core, and the RT Core. Turing SM's performance tops at 14 TFLOPS, which is about 5 TFLOPS more than the previous generation card. The RT Core, responsible for ray tracing, can do 10 Giga rays/sec. The 1080TI 1.21 Giga rays/sec or 10X the performance. Tensor Cores are primary responsible for deep learning. All together, you're looking at 6X Volta's performance.

RTX can really bring out the detail of objects and reflections add so much to a scene. Take a look at what RTX off images look like compared to RTX on images.

NVIDIA showed off a demo running on one Turing GPU called SOL. It showed off a sci-fi scene of a man being fitting with body armor. The amount of lights bouncing off the different pieces as well as the reflections from various other objects in the scene made for a highly impressive demo. But what was really impressive was the fact all this was in real time from one Turing card. Just one.

Gaming is what we're all interested here and Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed off the power of RTX and doing realistic shadows. Soft shadows really excelled with ray traced shadows and the people creating shadows from area lights soften up so much with RTX on. Hard shadows look OK, but RTX makes a much more realistic scene.

Metro Exodus was another demo they showed where a game that really uses lights, shadows, and color to drive an incredible atmospheric experience. With the RTX card, it made a very beautiful game even more so with much better lighting. Global illumination really shined here with different levels of light in various parts of the building. I mean, look at the Direct Light vs RTX enhanced global illumination. The difference is amazing.

One game I'm really looking forward to seeing this technology used is Assetto Corsa Competizione. Imagine all the reflections that can take place in a race track from other cars, buildings, the track, all at high speed.

Battlefield V uses RTX for complex reflections even for things that happen off screen. From explosions, flames, and even the soldiers themselves, you can see all the detail of reflections on multiple surfaces. As one of my friends said, photo mode will be taken to another level with RTX.

So there's plenty of games coming soon with RTX capabilities, but what about the cards themselves?

The Geforce RTX 20 series is designed for overclocking, but built for quiet operation. Three models will be available.

The RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and the RTX 2080Ti. 

I think this is the first time a Ti card is announced the same time along with the regular cards. Both the 2070 and 2080 have 8GB of memory, but the Ti goes up to 11GB.

$499 is what the RTX 2070 will be available for. $699 gets you the RTX 2080 and if you go up to $999, you can nab the RTX 2080 Ti card. The $499 RTX 2070 is an incredible price. You can pre-order now and they will be on the shelf on September 20th, one month from now. And there will be founder edition cards as well for $100 more in the 2070 and 2080 versions with a $200 premium on the 2080 Ti.

More details to come as soon as we get our hands on these awesome sounding cards, but I'm really excited by what NVIDIA has coming in a month from today.

NVIDIA RTX Hybrid Graphics Made Possible by AI and Ray Tracing Inventions; Delivers 6x Performance Boost; September Availability

Gamescom—NVIDIA today unveiled the GeForce RTX™ series, the first gaming GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Turing™ architecture and the NVIDIA RTX™ platform, which fuses next-generation shaders with real-time ray tracing and all-new AI capabilities.

This new hybrid graphics capability represents the biggest generational leap ever in gaming GPUs. Turing -- which delivers 6x more performance than its predecessor, Pascal™ -- redefines the PC as the ultimate gaming platform, with new features and technologies that deliver 4K HDR gaming at 60 frames per second on even the most advanced titles.

“Turing opens up a new golden age of gaming, with realism only possible with ray tracing, which most people thought was still a decade away,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, speaking before Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming expo. “The breakthrough is a hybrid rendering model that boosts today’s computer graphics with the addition of lightning-fast ray-tracing acceleration and AI. RTX is going to define a new look for computer graphics. Once you see an RTX game, you can’t go back.”

GeForce RTX — New Family of Gaming GPUs
The new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 GPUs are packed with features never before seen in a gaming GPU, including:

  • New RT Cores to enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination.
  • Turing Tensor Cores to perform lightning-fast deep neural network processing.
  • New NGX neural graphics framework integrates AI into the overall graphics pipeline, enabling AI algorithms to perform amazing image enhancement and generation.
  • New Turing shader architecture with Variable Rate Shading allows shaders to focus processing power on areas of rich detail, boosting overall performance.
  • New memory system featuring ultra-fast GDDR6 with over 600GB/s of memory bandwidth for high-speed, high-resolution gaming.
  • NVIDIA NVLink®, a high-speed interconnect that provides higher bandwidth (up to 100 GB/s) and improved scalability for multi-GPU configurations (SLI).
  • Hardware support for USB Type-C™ and VirtualLink™(1), a new open industry standard being developed to meet the power, display and bandwidth demands of next-generation VR headsets through a single USB-C™ connector.
  • New and enhanced technologies to improve performance of VR applications, including Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering and VRWorks Audio.

Designed by NVIDIA for Gamers 
NVIDIA is releasing special Founders Edition versions of the new GeForce RTX GPUs. Designed and built to the company’s high standards, the GPUs’ key features include:

  • Factory-overclocked design out of the box, with a next-gen 13-phase iMON DrMOS power supply and sub-millisecond power management for maximum overclocking.
  • Dual 13-blade axial fans produce 3x higher airflow and ultra-quiet acoustics.
  • Forged and machine-finished diecast aluminum cover with diamond-cut edge detailing provides a rigid, lightweight frame for an open design with beautifully smooth, continuous curves.
  • First full-card vapor chamber, which is 2x larger to maximize heat spreading and heat transfer to the finstack.
  • Enhanced DisplayPort 1.4a with DSC allows a single connector to drive an 8K monitor at 60Hz.

Industry-Wide Support for GeForce RTX

The world’s top game publishers, developers and engine creators have announced support for the NVIDIA RTX platform to bring the holy grail of real-time ray tracing and the power of AI to gamers everywhere. They include Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, Control, and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Developers include EA, Square Enix, EPIC Games, and more.

The NVIDIA RTX platform has quickly emerged as the industry standard for real-time ray tracing and artificial intelligence in games.

The RTX platform is also being adopted by a large number of developers of professional rendering applications, including Adobe, Autodesk and Pixar.

Starting at $499, Pre-Orders Today, Availability Sept. 20 
Starting at $499, GeForce RTX graphics cards, including the NVIDIA Founders Edition, will be available worldwide, across 238 countries and territories. They will be sold by partners including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac.

Pre-orders on nvidia.com and at over 100 participating partners starts today for GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080, with availability starting on Sept. 20. GeForce RTX 2070 will be available in October.

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

* Equivalent aggregate math operations contributed by the Turing Shaders, CUDA Cores, Tensor Cores, and RT Cores needed to render RTX graphics. Result applies to Founders Edition version.