Nvidia's new GeForce RTX line of consumer graphics cards is finally official and due to start shipping soon. These cards are based on the GPU giant's Turing architecture and are the first with built-in, real-time ray tracing capability.
Here's what you need to know about Turing and Nvidia's first three cards: the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070.
What makes the RTX 2080 and its siblings special?
Nvidia's Turing architecture allows the RTX cards to perform
real-time ray tracing, which allows for extremely realistic lighting and reflections. Before Turing, the only way to get ray tracing into a game was in pre-rendered cutscenes.
Nvidia's new GPUs not only have dedicated ray-tracing (RT) cores, but also A.I. "Tensor Core" that help predict what pixels are needed to create the effect. According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang "reflections will never be the same again."
Turing also promises faster performance in non-ray tracing workloads than the previous Pascal architecture. The company claims that an improved graphics pipeline, more CUDA cores (Nvidia's GPU cores) and new shading techniques help overall frame rates. The cards use
GDDR6 memory which should provide a significant speed bump over the GDDR5 memory in the Pascal cards.