Nvidia Announces GeForce RTX GPUs, 2070 Starts at $499

Update 8/20, 4:00 p.m. ET: Nvidia confirmed to Tom's Hardware that the GeForce RTX 2070 will launch in October, after the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070, ending a roughly two-year drought of new GPUs from the company. The GPUs were revealed at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The cards are based on the company’s brand-new Turing architecture, initially announced last week. The GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition sell for $799 and the 2080 Ti Founders Edition will cost $1,199. Both are available for pre-order now and will ship Sept. 20. The GeForce RTX 2070 will cost $599.99, but you can only sign up to be notified on Nvidia's website. Representatives for Nvidia say that card will ship in October. Huang said that the RTX 2070 will outperform the Titan Xp.

The RTX moniker signals the card’s ray tracing capabilities and also shows off artificial intelligence and programmable shading. Huang began the GeForce announcement by describing ray tracing and how light, shadow and reflection are the "holy grail" of graphics. Nvidia's RTX technology combines rasterization and ray tracing to render images. The cards feature dual-fans, which is new for Nvidia's Founders Edition line.

Huang stated that the 2070 will start at $499, the 2080 starting at $699 and the 2080Ti starting at $999, so it's possible third-party GPUs will be cheaper than Nvidia's own.

Huang showcased a real-time demo using a Star Wars scene that Nvidia has showcased several times since it was first shown at GDC in March. He revealed, echoing the recent Siggraph announcement, that it was running on the Turing architecture. You can read more about that architecture, including the Turing die and its RT and tensor cores, here. The company claims performance of roughly four Volta chips, Huang said on stage. In other words, that's the power of Nvidia's $49,900 DGX box in just one chip. However, these new chips are designed for one specific task: graphics while gaming. Huang referred to Turing as a "monster."

The cards will be compatible with NVLink Bridge, which connects two SLI-compatible cards with 50 times the bandwidth of Nvidia's older SLI technologies. It comes in 3 or 4-slot options and is available for pre-order now. Both are scheduled to ship on or around Sept. 20.

The company showed the soon-to-be released Shadow of the Tomb Raider, showing off ray-traced shadows and lighting in an early stage of the game. Lights from candles and sparklers produced light that made shadows softer. Spotlights also looked amazing and realistic. It also showed Metro Exodus to show indirect lighting, with illumination coming in through a window to light a dining room. And in a racing game, the sky was reflected off the track and cards in a clean fashion. A huge deal was made over reflections of fire in Battlefield V, especially in cars and fire, even when the actual flames weren't on screen. Upcoming games with ray-tracing include We Happy Few, Hitman 2, Final Fantasy XV, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Remanant from the Ashes and Dauntless. 

Following the announcement, several desktop manufacturers announced new systems that will have the cards, including Alienware, Acer and Digital Storm. For builders, cards were announced from several partners, including MSI, Asus, PNY, Zotac, Gigabyte and EVGA.