Conclusion

NVIDIA's new Turing generation of graphics cards promises to be one of the biggest moves forward for rendering technology in this decade. The company has not only added the foundation for artificial intelligence in Turing, but also created a hardware-accelerated engine for ray tracing.

Ray tracing especially seems interesting for gamers as it finally gives developers the tools needed to create new effects that simply weren't possible with rasterization before, or that were too computationally demanding. However, if you now expect fully ray-traced games to appear immediately, you'll be disappointed. In this first iteration of RTX, ray tracing will be limited to add-on effects, which of course can look stunning, but we're still far from the day when ray tracing replaces rasterization in games.

Ray tracing adoption will also heavily depend on developers and publishers. It's great to see several API standards for ray tracing backed by all the major industry players. In my opinion, the deciding factor will be adoption in consoles, though. Most titles today are developed for consoles first, which run on AMD hardware that have no support for ray tracing at this time. No doubt AMD, Sony, and Microsoft are working hard to bring ray-tracing capabilities to consoles, which would intensify developer efforts and convince publishers to allocate significant money and development time for these features. NVIDIA does have an excellent reputation with developers and their developer support is legendary in the industry. That's why I'm hoping that NVIDIA can leverage their potential by helping game developers see the light (literally) in implementing ray tracing in future games.

Several big game franchises, like Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, Battlefield V, etc., have already announced to support RTX, so it won't be long. At this stage, it looks like everybody is just dipping their toes into ray tracing, possibly exploring and inventing new techniques. Going by the adoption rate of DirectX 12 and Vulkan, I seriously doubt that titles in the coming years will require ray tracing exclusively, forcing you to upgrade your old graphics cards.

NVIDIA has not only worked on ray tracing, but also on making their GPU faster in existing games. The shader engine has been upgraded to concurrently support execution of integer and floating point instructions, which will give a nice boost in every single game without the game developer having to make any code changes. Also improved are caches, to work more efficiently with modern applications, and the high clocks of GDDR6 memory ensure that this whole pipeline gets fed properly with texture and model data.

Artificial intelligence through deep learning is expected to deliver the next technological revolution, and we're just at the beginning. While for the general consumer, no killer AI application (pun unintended) exists today, researchers and companies are hard at work at exploring many use cases. The integration of Tensor Cores to accelerate AI workloads is a great supporting move, as suddenly millions of consumers have the capability to run demanding AI workloads in their computers. NVIDIA is at the forefront of AI research, with the most recent highlight being AI-assisted anti-aliasing, which could provide better results with lower hardware requirements.

It is slightly unprecedented to see three new SKUs get announced on the same day: RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070. More so because it breaks NVIDIA's tradition of launching the RTX 2080-predecessor first and the RTX 2080 Ti-predecessor several months later. NVIDIA worked around this "problem" by pricing the RTX 2080 Ti north of a thousand bucks, with Founders Edition SKUs adding another 10%-20% mark-up. The RTX 2080 at $700-$800 could fall into fewer hands than the GTX 1080 did, and the RTX 2070 has a lot of design goals weighing on its shoulders at its $500-$600 price, least of which is to beat the GTX 1080 Ti.

We have several RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti boards here for full review, and the results are extremely promising so far. Wish we could tell you more.. very soon.. when the NVIDIA review embargo lifts.