Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti hands-on preview and unboxing

The Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are right here, they’re in our palms and within the labs benchmarking away as I sort. How thrilling. The new playing cards symbolize the primary shopper GPUs of the Turing era and the primary genuinely new Nvidia playing cards to drop in round 18 months.

That’s a very long time within the graphics card market, however these have been fairly frickin’ barren occasions. We’ve had cryptocurrency miners rinsing the factories dry of GPUs all through many of the yr, and no-one bothering to launch new playing cards as a result of they will barely handle to provide those they’ve already launched.

But now we have now a glut of latest playing cards… nicely, two. Though as a result of Nvidia has modified up the best way it’s managing this launch, there must be plenty of completely different variations of each the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 come the September 20 launch. For its half, Nvidia is popping out with overclocked Founder’s Edition playing cards, permitting its companions to start out promoting their very own variations on the similar time, with the choice to create both reference-clocked playing cards or stupidly costly even-more-overclocked monsters.

We’ll have our full opinions of each the brand new Nvidia graphics as soon as the straitjackets of embargoes have lifted and we’re allowed to speak concerning the precise efficiency, however for now you’ll be able to bask within the radiant glow of some new {hardware} with some severely spectacular specs numbers.

If you’re after a full breakdown of the brand new Nvidia Turing structure we’ve bought all the products in our deep-dive article, however right here’s a fast breakdown of the highest graphics card popping out of the brand new vary, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The card that’s more likely to be the quickest shopper graphics card ever launched. Aren’t they at all times…

The Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founder’s Edition from the inexperienced group prices $1,199 (£1,099) whereas the usual MSRP for the reference-clocked variations from the third-party add-in board companions (AIBs) begin at $999 (£949).

And when it comes to specs, nicely it’s the most important darn GPU I’ve ever seen. The 754mm2 TU102 GPU contained in the RTX 2080 Ti sports activities 4,352 CUDA cores arrayed throughout 64 Turing streaming multiprocessors (SMs) and 6 common processing clusters (GPCs). It’s not the total TU102 GPU, nonetheless, that’s reserved for the Quadro RTX 600 and RTX 8000 skilled playing cards. The full chip has 72 SMs and 4,608 CUDA cores.

Along with the usual GPU goodies, Nvidia’s new Turing structure can also be fitted with AI-focuses Tensor Cores and ray tracing RT Cores. The Tensor Cores have been ripped from the Volta structure and can enable builders to combine real deep studying energy into their games, in addition to benefit from tremendous sensible super-sampling within the form of DLSS.

The RT Cores, nonetheless, are all about real-time ray tracing. They’re the fixed-function cores constructed into the Turing structure that offloads all of the complicated ray tracing calculations from the usual SMs and accelerates the bounding quantity hierarchy algorithms obligatory for monitoring the paths and intersections of sunshine rays and geometry.

We’ve already performed Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield 5 working the total RTX builds in alpha type, and the devs are focusing on a 1080p decision and 60fps. That may sound fairly low contemplating everybody’s speaking about 144Hz at 4K, however c’mon, that is real-time ray tracing we’re speaking about right here. That’s some severely complicated computation that beforehand wanted a number of tons of of 1000’s of {dollars} price {of professional} GPU to do.

And we’re getting it in games launched this yr.