In the aftermath of NVIDIA's RTX 20-series announcement, we returned to NVIDIA's Palladium venue to see if there were any new "faces" to spy. And sure enough, there were. Lo and behold, a non-rendered RTX 2080 Ti, which was left to reporters' guises and cameras, where we can look at the dual fan solution and NVIDIA's industrial design - which still looks great, perhaps even better, in this latest iteration.

It has to be said that the new generation of graphics cards sports internal changes as well as on the shroud: there's a revised vapor-chamber solution to keep the increased power consumption in check - and keeping that low noise profile. You'll also note the added USB Type-C connector to the back of the card, aiding in the new data transfer protocol (VirtuaLink) for VR headsets.

(Update 1: Added the full 21 games list for RTX support.)

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's Koln event announced partnerships with multiple games studios. This is part of NVIDIA's push to bring real time ray tracing and NVIDIA's RTX platforms' achievements to actual games that gamers can play. These encompass heavy hitters such as Battlefield V (DICE), Hitman 2 (IO Interactive), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics), Metro Exodus (4A Games) and Control (Remedy Entertainment).

However, not all games are made equal, and NVIDIA knows there are significant gaming experiences coming from other, smaller studios. That's why partnerships have been established with the studios developing games such as We Happy Few (Compulsion Games), Atomic Heart (Mundfish), Assetto Corsa Competizione (Kunos Simulazioni), just to name a few. Of course, RTX's nature as a technology depends on NVIDIA's push for the initial implementation wave, and the company will be looking to bring developers up to speed with all needed programming skills, needs and difficulties inherent to the adoption of any new development framework. However, that DICE have already implemented an Alpha Version of NVIDIA's RTX technology into Battlefield V is surely a good sign.

NVIDIA revealed the SEP prices of its GeForce RTX 20-series, and it's a bloodbath in the absence of competition from AMD. The SEP price is the lowest price you'll be able to find a custom-design card at. NVIDIA is pricing its reference design cards, dubbed "Founders Edition," at a premium of 10-15 percent. These cards don't just have a better (looking) cooler, but also slightly higher clock speeds.

The GeForce RTX 2070 is where the lineup begins, for now. This card has an SEP pricing of USD $499. Its Founders Edition variant is priced at $599, or a staggering 20% premium. You'll recall that the previous-generation GTX 1070 launched at $379, with its Founders Edition at $449. The GeForce RTX 2080, which is the posterboy of this series, starts at $699, with its Founders Edition card at $799. The GTX 1080 launched at $599, with $699 for the Founders Edition. Leading the pack is the RTX 2080 Ti, launched at $999, with its Founders Edition variant at $1,199. The GTX 1080 Ti launched at $699, for the Founders Edition no less.

Redditors noticed NVIDIA published its GeForce RTX product page ahead of product launch. The page reveals MSRP prices for the first three Founders Edition products in the series, the RTX 2080, the RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 2070. The RTX 2080 is priced at USD $799.99, followed by the RTX 2080 Ti at $1,299 and the RTX 2070 at $599. All three new graphics cards will begin shipping on the 20th of September, 2018.

NVIDIA revealed that "Turing," the chip powering its RTX 2080-series has up to 18.9 billion transistors, making it the second biggest chip ever made (after NVIDIA V100). The Turing chip combines three key components, SM cores (CUDA cores), RT cores, and Tensor cores. The CUDA cores (SM cores) offer 14 TFLOPs of compute power; with tensor cores (4x4x4 matrix multiplication) at 110 TFLOPs FP16; and RT cores processing 10 giga-rays per second (10x over the predecessor).

With its GeForce "Maxwell" family, NVIDIA, riding on the multi-monitor fad, began equipping its graphics cards with up to three DisplayPort connectors, besides an HDMI, and optionally, a legacy DVI connector. Prior to that generation, AMD dabbled with equipping its cards with two mini-DisplayPorts, besides two DVI and an HDMI.

With the latest GeForce RTX "Turing" family, NVIDIA could push for the adoption of USB type-C connectors with DisplayPort wiring, and perhaps even USB-PD standards compliance, pushing up to 60 Watts of power from the same port. This USB+DP+Power connector is called VirtuaLink. This could make it easier for VR HMD manufacturers to design newer generations of their devices with a single USB type-C connection for display and audio input form the GPU, USB input from the system, and power. We reckon 60W is plenty of power for a VR HMD.

Later today (20th August), NVIDIA will formally unveil its GeForce RTX 2000 series consumer graphics cards. This marks a major change in the brand name, triggered with the introduction of the new RT Cores, specialized components that accelerate real-time ray-tracing, a task too taxing on conventional CUDA cores. Ray-tracing and DNN acceleration requires SIMD components to crunch 4x4x4 matrix multiplication, which is what RT cores (and tensor cores) specialize at. The chips still have CUDA cores for everything else. This generation also debuts the new GDDR6 memory standard, although unlike GeForce "Pascal," the new GeForce "Turing" won't see a doubling in memory sizes.

NVIDIA is expected to debut the generation with the new GeForce RTX 2080 later today, with market availability by end of Month. Going by older rumors, the company could launch the lower RTX 2070 and higher RTX 2080+ by late-September, and the mid-range RTX 2060 series in October. Apparently the high-end RTX 2080 Ti could come out sooner than expected, given that VideoCardz already has some of its specifications in hand. Not a lot is known about how "Turing" compares with "Volta" in performance, but given that the TITAN V comes with tensor cores that can [in theory] be re-purposed as RT cores; it could continue on as NVIDIA's halo SKU for the client-segment.

Positional audio, like Socialism, follows a cycle of glamorization and investment every few years. Back in 2011-12 when AMD maintained a relatively stronger position in the discrete GPU market, and held GPGPU superiority, it gave a lot of money to GenAudio and Tensilica to co-develop the TrueAudio technology, a GPU-accelerated positional audio DSP, which had a whopping four game title implementations, including and limited to "Thief," "Star Citizen," "Lichdom: Battlemage," and "Murdered: Soul Suspect." The TrueAudio Next DSP which debuted with "Polaris," introduced GPU-accelerated "audio ray-casting" technology, which assumes that audio waves interact differently with different surfaces, much like light; and hence positional audio could be made more realistic. There were a grand total of zero takers for TrueAudio Next. Riding on the presumed success of its RTX technology, NVIDIA wants to develop audio ray-tracing further.

A very curious sentence caught our eye in NVIDIA's micro-site for Turing. The description of RT cores reads that they are specialized components that "accelerate the computation of how light and sound travel in 3D environments at up to 10 Giga Rays per second." This is an ominous sign that NVIDIA is developing a full-blown positional audio programming model that's part of RTX, with an implementation through GameWorks. Such a technology, like TrueAudio Next, could improve positional audio realism by treating sound waves like light and tracing their paths from their origin (think speech from an NPC in a game), to the listener as the sound bounces off the various surfaces in the 3D scene. Real-time ray-tracing(-ish) has captured the entirety of imagination at NVIDIA marketing to the extent that it is allegedly willing to replace "GTX" with "RTX" in its GeForce GPU nomenclature. We don't mean to doomsay emerging technology, but 20 years of development in positional audio has shown that it's better left to game developers to create their own technology that sounds somewhat real; and that initiatives from makers of discrete sound cards (a device on the brink of extinction) and GPUs makers bore no fruit.

When NVIDIA debuted its "Turing" GPU architecture through its recent Quadro RTX series, PC enthusiasts felt being left hung and dry. The occasion was SIGGRAPH, the biggest annual expo of digital content creators, and so a Quadro unveiling felt fitting. Come 21st August, and Gamescom will be almost upon us. NVIDIA is planning its own event in host city Cologne a day earlier. The theme of the event is "Be For The Game."

NVIDIA posted the mother of all teasers pointing to the August 20 event. It doesn't mention a new product launch, but there are enough hints, such as the back-plate reminiscent of TITAN V, combined with glossy green and black surfaces that look similar to the Quadro RTX reference boards. The video winks at both gamers and PC enthusiasts, with the first half depicting a sick build being put together. We can't wait!The video follows.

NVIDIA today reinvented computer graphics with the launch of the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture. The greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

These two engines - along with more powerful compute for simulation and enhanced rasterization - usher in a new generation of hybrid rendering to address the $250 billion visual effects industry. Hybrid rendering enables cinematic-quality interactive experiences, amazing new effects powered by neural networks and fluid interactivity on highly complex models.

NVIDIA made big moves to bring a semblance of real-time ray-tracing to the masses, with the new RTX technology, as part of its efforts to replace rasterized rendering, which has dominated 3D graphics for the past three decades. Microsoft has come out with its own extension to DirectX 12, with the new DXR API. NVIDIA is now reportedly working with the Khronos Group to bring RTX to Vulkan.

A new Vulkan extension titled "VK_NV_raytracing" surfaced in tech-documents accessed by Phoronix, which is the company's contribution to a multi-vendor standard for ray-tracing, being developed by the Khronos Group. This extension could expose several NVIDIA RTX features and presets to Vulkan. It also has similar code-structures to DXR, to minimize duplication of effort, or skill-building. NVIDIA will detail its adaptation of RTX to Vulkan further at GTC.

At Adobe Summit, Adobe and NVIDIA today announced a strategic partnership to rapidly enhance their industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies. Building on years of collaboration, the companies will work to optimize the Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning (ML) framework for NVIDIA GPUs. The collaboration will speed time to market and improve performance of new Sensei-powered services for Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud customers and developers.

The partnership advances Adobe's strategy to extend the availability of Sensei APIs and to broaden the Sensei ecosystem to a new audience of developers, data scientists and partners. "Combining NVIDIA's best-in-class AI capabilities with Adobe's leading creative and digital experience solutions, all powered by Sensei, will allow us to deliver higher-performing AI services to customers and developers more quickly," said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe. "We're excited to partner with NVIDIA to push the boundaries of what's possible in creativity, marketing and exciting new areas like immersive media."

After the world was introduced to the Microsoft and NVIDIA partnership to bring real time raytracing solutions to DirectX 12 via NVIDIA's RTX initiative, we now have confirmation of what is expected to be the first game studio - and AAA game experience - to feature the technology. In a post from their official Twitter account, 4A Games has announced that they are collaborating with NVIDIA to bring RTX's effects to their upcoming Metro: Exodus open-world video game.

The company further warned users to keep at attention towards the impending release of a proof of concept video to be released during GDC. 4A Games is one of those companies that has been delivering incredible experiences through and through, and has already dabbled with NVIDIA's technologies in the past (particularly with their first game, Metro 2033). Here's hoping that AMD can work its drivers into great performance levels in supporting this DX12 technology on their graphics cards as well.