NVIDIA just unveiled their brand new lineup of RTX graphics cards and has offered a one of a kind revolutionary leap that’s bigger than even the Kepler to Maxwell leap of old. The company has introduced two completely new engines into its GPUs that offer a performance boost of up to 600% in some visual effects! That is an absolutely insane leap and one that will be sure to propel the graphics industry forward a few years.
The holy grail of graphics – ray traced gaming is here, thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070
So what’s the big deal about? Well, all previous generations of NVIDIA GeForce graphics have contained only one type of engine: the shader engine. The brand new RTX series contains three types of engines: the standard shader engine, an RT engine, and tensor cores. NVIDIA has been able to harness the power of AI and dedicated RT processors to offer performance leaps that are absolutely unheard off in the industry. A single RTX 2080 Ti is 10x faster than a 1080 Ti in AI and 6x faster than a 1080 Ti in ray tracing – which is absolutely bonkers!
Related NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Full Reference Cooler and PCB Breakdown – Crazy Amounts of Overclocking With Cool and Quiet Operation, Factory Overclocked Out of Box
A slide from the event showcasing the 8x performance leap over Pascal’s flagship.
NVIDIA has introduced a whole plethora of features in this event and has leveraged the increased AI performance to innovative techniques such as predicting pixels to dynamically lower graphics load at high resolutions – you can expect twice the number of fps in 4k thanks to the deep learned models predicting how pixels will play out. This means that even though the CUDA Core count of the RTX 2080 Ti isn’t that high over its predecessor, the AI will add on a multiplier effect – giving you much higher performance than anything that could naturally occur.
The ray tracing feature is of course the most revolutionary one however. Ever since the dawn of gaming, pixels have been rendered using rasterization which meant that developers had to add on effects and all the eye candy manually. With real-time ray tracing however, all the developer needs to do is set the material properties and add on a couple of lights for drop dead gorgeous and utterly realistic graphics. This isn’t a revolution waiting to happen – it’s already started.
The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is powered by the TU102 GPU, while the RTX 2080 and the RTX 2070 are powered by the Turing TU104 GPU. The TU104 GPU is the successor to NVIDIA’s GP104 GPU and sticks to the same principles which made the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 great which is to offer gamers the best performance at the highest efficiency rate (perf/watt) and deliver products that are highly competitive in pricing and performance.
GeForce RTX — New Family of Gaming GPUs
The new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 GPUs are packed with features never before seen in a gaming GPU, including:
- New RT Cores to enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination.
- Turing Tensor Cores to perform lightning-fast deep neural network processing.
- New NGX neural graphics framework integrates AI into the overall graphics pipeline, enabling AI algorithms to perform amazing image enhancement and generation.
- New Turing shader architecture with Variable Rate Shading allows shaders to focus processing power on areas of rich detail, boosting overall performance.
- New memory system featuring ultra-fast GDDR6 with over 600GB/s of memory bandwidth for high-speed, high-resolution gaming.
- NVIDIA NVLink®, a high-speed interconnect that provides higher bandwidth (up to 100 GB/s) and improved scalability for multi-GPU configurations (SLI).
- Hardware support for USB Type-C™ and VirtualLink™(1), a new open industry standard being developed to meet the power, display and bandwidth demands of next-generation VR headsets through a single USB-C™ connector.
- New and enhanced technologies to improve the performance of VR applications, including Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering, and VRWorks Audio.
