After months of leaks and rumours, Nvidia has finally unveiled its new generation of consumer graphics cards at their Gamescom event with the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti.
Yes, Nvidia is finally moving on from its GTX naming convention after a decade, while also jumping from 10-series to 20-series cards. RTX refers to real-time ray tracing, a computationally expensive process of accurately modelling how light bounces between reflective surfaces in a scene. Ray tracing in real time has been a holy grail for graphics card makers for years, and it looks like Nvidia has become the first to truly crack this photo-realistic lighting effect.
Nvidia is promising ray tracing performance which is six times faster than previous generation graphics hardware, thanks to dedicated RT cores. Nvidia replayed the Star Wars short they released at GDC in March, and CEO Jensen Huang stated that the four Volta V100 data centre GPUs used to originally render the short are outperformed by a single consumer-grade RTX 2080 Ti – impressive stuff.
Source: Eurogamer Nvidia unveil RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at Gamescom