Like it or not … Nvidia GeForce RTX cards will be here to stay, but the prices are way too much for your average gamer. Can Nvidia really convince the mass audience that these new RTX cards are the future?
Starting at the bottom, in terms of raw power, the RTX 2070 is roughly equivalent to the GTX 1080; the RTX 2080 goes toe to toe with the GTX 1080 Ti; the RTX 2080 Ti is in a league of its own. The 2070 and 2080 have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM; the 2080 Ti has 11GB. All three are based on the company’s new Turing architecture, which means they have cores dedicated to AI (Tensor) and ray-tracing (RT).
Expect a fourth card, likely the RTX 2060, to bring the entry price down significantly in the coming months, followed by a slew of cut-down options for budget-minded gamers (the 10 series made its way down to the sub-$100 GTX 1030). There’s also room at the top end for expansion: The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition can handle 14.2 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS), while the Turing TU102 chip these new cards are based on pushes that figure up to 16.3 TFLOPS. That’s achieved through a mix of higher clock speeds and more CUDA cores (the 2080 Ti has 4,352, the fully configured TU102 has 4,608.)
RTX also arrives with a lot of under-the-hood improvements. There’s a faster caching system with a shared memory architecture, a new graphics pipeline and concurrent processing of floating and integer calculations. If that means nothing to you, don’t worry too much: The takeaway from that word soup is not only does the RTX range have more raw power, but it uses that power more efficiently.
Source: Engadget
