Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition

A revolutionary ahead of its time?

- Jarred Walton

THE FUTURE OF GRAPHICS CARDS and gaming is about to experience the next revolution; at least, that’s the marketing behind Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards. When Nvidia demonstrated real-time ray tracing running at 24fps on a DGX Station earlier this year, it felt like a lot of hoopla over something more beneficial to Hollywood than PC gamers. Six months later, we’re looking at a single graphics card that can outperform the DGX Station, at just $799. Great news, at least for enthusiast gamers with deep pockets.

The technology crammed into Nvidia’s Turing architecture is certainly impressive. The CUDA cores have been enhanced, promising up to 50 percent higher performance than on Pascal, and there’s more of them. Next, add faster GDDR6 memory, improved caching, and memory subsystem tweaks that also provide up to 75 percent more effective memory bandwidth. Then toss in some RT cores to accelerate ray tracing, and Tensor cores for deep-learning applications.