Every few years, a graphics card comes along that's just too powerful for even the $500 price point. Sure, NVIDIA's Titan cards have held that distinction for a while, but this year we're talking about the 80 model of the company's latest generation GPUs. The Turing generation of cards was officially revealed today at Gamescom, and both the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti will be available starting next month.
Revealing both a regular and Ti version of a chip at the same time is a bit unusual for NVIDIA, but then again so are their price points. The RTX 2080 will set you back about $799, while the RTX 2080 Ti will cost $1199. That's a price point NVIDIA cards haven't seen since the 780, with both the 980 and 1080 keeping closer to the $550 range. That price point will soon be occupied by the 2070, which doesn't currently have a release date.
Now that you're done sweating over the price, let's take a look at the actual specs. The RTX 2080 features 2944 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1515 MHz, a boost clock of 1710 MHz, and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM with a memory speed of 14 Gbps. The 2080 Ti will feature 4352 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1350 MHz, boost clock of 1545 MHz, and 11GB GDDR6 VRAM with the same 14 Gbps memory speed. The Ti edition also features a 352-bit memory interface width for a bandwidth of 616 GB/s compared to the 2080's 256-bit interface and 448 GB/s bandwidth. The 2070 features the same VRAM and memory configuration as the 2080, but it has fewer CUDA cores at 2304 and a base/boost clock of 1410/1620 MHz.
If you've been in the market for a new GPU and you have $800 to spend on it, both the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti will be available starting September 20. If you'd prefer a more reasonably priced graphics solution, the 2070 will be arriving eventually, with a 2050 and 2060 likely to follow in the coming months based on NVIDIA's habits over the last few generations.
Still, this is odd, yeah? The Ti line usually comes out about a year after the initial run, no?
I dont believe the 2070 is that much more powerful than a 1070. In fact I believe they might be 10% more powerful than their previous generation. They can just use ray tracing which is cool and all but not needed.
If the 2080 Ti is only around 1080 Ti performance, than it is a complete waste of money. To justify the almost double price, they would need to at least have a 50% increase.
Also, I assume since these are going to be Founder's Editions at launch, it would probably be best, whatever card one is interested in, to wait for all the aftermarket cards by EVGA, MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, and everyone else and their brother to launch their versions.
Edit: I just read more, and it looks like there is a marked increase in technology of the new line, even if technically it is only marginally more powerful than the 1080 ti.
Dont get me wrong, Ray Tracing is neat and might become the standard. But is new tech. It also is not widely supported. Consoles usually set the stage for what games will include. If AMD does not include Ray Tracing in the new consoles its just a waste for now.
I think the GTX 2080 Ti will be faster than the 1080 Ti without Ray Tracing but by maybe 20%. Making it one of the worse deals for a GPU.
I expect ray tracing right now won't be seen on many new games for awhile TBH. Depends on if developers will see a limited technology being worth implementing.
Depending on how much the 20xx improves on the 10xx I might try to budget an upgrade into it, but the most noticeable upgrade I will make for now is a CPU upgrade, since I'm still running a Phenom II X4. GPU upgrades will bottleneck my system even more than it already is right now.