Nvidia officially announces the new RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards launching September 20

They’ve been a long time coming, but Jen-Hsun Huang has just taken the wrap off the brand new generation of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards, the RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 2080, and the RTX 2070, starting at $499. These aren’t the super-expensive, pro-level cards for the 3D modellers, oh no, these are the super-expensive graphics cards for gamers. Well, rich gamers, anyways. They’re based on the same Turing technology that Jen-Hsun announced at SIGGRAPH earlier in the month, a GPU architecture designed with the future of rendering very much in mind - real-time ray tracing. It’s a brave move, represented by the switch from GTX nomenclatures to the RTX naming scheme used for the latest Quadro cards, and the specific real-time ray tracing technology Nvidia announced back in March. The RTX suite of hardware and software algorithms will back up the RTX 20-series cards, and are designed to allow real-time ray tracing to be added into games to add extra fidelity to lighting, with Microsoft also introducing its own DirectX Raytracing (DXR) standard to the party too. Between them they’re aiming to bring more realism to games, and do it in a way that allows developers to work with it in a familiar way.