Skip to main content

Nvidia teaser suggests ‘RTX 2080’ GPU is launching next week

Nvidia teaser suggests ‘RTX 2080’ GPU is launching next week

/

Nvidia has a GeForce event at Gamescom on Monday

Share this story

Nvidia has been teasing its upcoming GeForce GPUs for months now. The graphics card maker just officially unveiled its Turing GPU architecture today, and it looks like the first gaming-focused GeForce GPUs will be unveiled next week. Nvidia previously teased “spectacular surprises” for its GeForce event at Gamescom next week, and now the company has unveiled a teaser video that includes even more clues.

The teaser video ends with flashes of a graphics card with a new cooler, backplate design, and shroud design. While it’s clear Nvidia is teasing an all-new GPU, the video also includes some hints at the naming. Reddit users were quick to spot (via Wccftech) that a number of Discord usernames seem to point towards an RTX 2080 name. Usernames like RoyTeX (RTX), Not_11, Mac-20, and Eight Tee all seem to spell out RTX 2080, a potential name for the new Nvidia card. There are even GPS coordinates for Cologne in the Discord messages, and Nvidia unveils the date for its GeForce event by making the “2080” numbers rise up in order at the very end of the teaser.

Ray tracing will be the big new feature

Nvidia’s new Turing architecture focuses on dedicated RT Cores for ray tracing, a technique that’s designed to improve lighting effects in games. Nvidia describes its new ray-tracing GPU as the biggest leap since CUDA back in 2006, so it’s likely that we’ll see how these new RT Cores make a difference in gaming next week. Many had been expecting Nvidia to simply introduce a GTX 1180 GPU with new GDDR6 memory and solid support for 4K games at 60fps.

It’s possible that Nvidia may now introduce a new RTX series to compliment its existing GTX GPUs, and focus the new cards on the ability to do real-time ray tracing in games. It’s a feature that could make games look a lot different with these new cards, and Nvidia will now need to demonstrate a variety of games that use ray-tracing to highlight the differences. The Verge will be live from Nvidia’s Gamescom event on August 20th, so stay tuned for further details.