Everything you need to know about Nvidia's RTX Super graphics cards

Talk about a royal gazumping. After months and months of hype and build-up toward the release of AMD's new Navi GPUs, Nvidia have just casually announced three new RTX graphics cards in the form of the RTX 2060 Super, the RTX 2070 Super, and the RTX 2080 Super. And two of them are launching next Tuesday on July 9th. That's just two days after AMD's Navi launch, and as you'll be able to see from my reviews of the Nvidia RTX 2060 Super and Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, AMD could be a tiny spot of bother.

But what exactly makes these cards so, well, 'super', and where do they fit into Nvidia's ever-expanding best graphics card hierarchy? Here's everything you need to know about Nvidia's RTX Super cards, including their specs, price and various release dates.

Nvidia RTX Super specs

In a nutshell, each RTX Super card has been designed with one thing in mind: to deliver superior real-time ray tracing performance than their non-Super counterparts. Ray tracing, in case you've forgotten, is the fancy pants realistic lighting and shadow technology everyone's been banging on about ever since Nvidia hailed it as the second coming of graphics fidelity during their initial RTX launch back in August 2018. And don't get me wrong - there are plenty of confirmed ray tracing games in the pipeline, but even now there are still precious few of them that have actually got round to adding it into games you can play right now.

Still, if you've been on the fence about upgrading to one of Nvidia's RTX cards - either because of the performance deficit ray tracing brings to the table, or because you don't like the way its upscaling/performance-boosting DLSS tech looks when it tries to compensate for said loss of performance - the Super versions certainly make a more convincing argument than their non-Super predecessors.

They're sort of like Nvidia's more traditional Ti variants, but also not. With faster memory, more CUDA cores and even more AI-based Tensor gubbins to churn through all that ray tracing data, you almost get the sense that these are what Nvidia's RTX cards should have been when they launched back in August. They'll continue to exist alongside their non-Super variants, Nvidia tells me (at least for now), but I wouldn't be surprised if the regular RTX cards started becoming more scarce as these ones start to settle in. Here's how they all stack up against each other:

As you can see, the RTX 2060 Super gets the biggest upgrade out of the two, getting another 2GB of GGDR6 memory and a lot more memory bandwidth. Then again, cast your eye over the regular RTX 2070 specs below and you'll start to see they look pretty familiar. Indeed, Nvidia themselves had said that the RTX 2060 Super is on average just 1% slower than the regular RTX 2070 at 1440p, which sort of suggests it's just a slightly repackaged RTX 2070 card.

The RTX 2070 Super, on the other hand, is based off Nvidia's more upmarket TU104 Turing GPU - the same one used by the regular RTX 2080. And surprise, surprise, it's all starting to look rather familiar again compared to the base RTX 2080's specs (see below).

Nvidia haven't released the full specs for the RTX 2080 Super yet, but they have told me it will have 89 Tensor FLOPS, a memory speed of 15 Gbps and will be faster than their Titan Xp. Naturally, I'll update this article with more information as soon as I get it, which will probably be closer to the RTX 2080 Super's launch later this month. Speaking of which, let's talk release dates.

Nvidia RTX Super release dates

As I mentioned right at the start of this article, the first two Nvidia RTX Super cards are coming pretty darn soon. Next week, in fact, so here's how they all break down:

• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super: July 9
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super: July 9
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: July 23

Nvidia RTX Super prices

If Nvidia's RTX Super specs don't exactly fill you with hope, then perhaps their prices will. Here's what they're all due to start at, plus how much you can currently get their non-Super counterparts for as well:

Looking at it, this way the RTX 2060 Super is effectively a much cheaper way of getting RTX 2070-level power (which let's not forget is a teensy bit nippier than the GTX 1080) without spending crazy amounts of cash, while the RTX 2070 Super offers even faster performance (more than a GTX 1080 Ti, says Nvidia) than the RTX 2070 for a similar-ish sort of price. The RTX 2080 Super, meanwhile, is set to do the same for the RTX 2080 - more performance for the same cost, and apparently faster than the Titan Xp. The RTX 2080 Ti, meanwhile, remains at the top of Nvidia's RTX family as the best graphics card you can buy today.

To see whether any of the Nvidia RTX Super cards are actually worth buying, have a read of my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 review and my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super review. Needless to say, though, considering AMD's been bigging up their RX 5700 card has being faster than the RTX 2060 for $379, it's going to have to work jolly hard if it's going to beat its new Super-fied rival. The RX 5700 XT is probably a bit safer, as that's meant to be faster than the RTX 2070 for less money at $449, so that one may still have a chance in this new, post-RTX Super world. All will be revealed on July 7th, so keep your eyes peeled for more graphics card goodness this Sunday.