Geforce RTX pre-order?
The revolutionary NVIDIA Turing™ architecture, combined with our all new GeForce RTX™ platform, fuses together real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading to give you a whole new way to experience games.
The GeForce RTX™ 2080 is powered by the all-new NVIDIA Turing™ architecture to give you incredible new levels of gaming realism, speed, power efficiency, and immersion. This is graphics reinvented.
GeForce RTX™ graphics cards are powered by the Turing GPU architecture and the all-new RTX platform. This gives you up to 6X the performance of previous-generation graphics cards and brings the power of real-time ray tracing and AI to games.
- Up to6XFaster Performance
- Real-Time RAY TRACINGIn Games
- PowerfulAIEnhanced Graphics
Reinventing Design - The factory overclocked GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition graphics card features a next-gen 8-phase power supply for maximum overclocking and dual-axial 13-blade fans coupled with a new vapor chamber for ultra-cool and quiet performance.
Should I Pre-Order?
Nvidia announced its line of next-generation graphics cards, the RTX 20-series GPUs, during a pre-Gamescom 2018 press briefing Monday in Cologne, Germany, and suddenly, everyone is talking about what real-time ray tracing will bring to PC gaming. But it’s important to pump the brakes on the hype, so that we can remind you of what’s always the best strategy for new technology: Wait a little bit before jumping in.
But no matter how large the leap forward is, these new GPUs won’t matter for the majority of PC gamers. Unless you were planning on upgrading this fall anyways, there’s not a big incentive to go and pick up these cards for at least a couple of years.
The highlight of the GeForce RTX series is its ray tracing capabilities. This highly-anticipated feature is now finally available for the first time ever on consumer graphics chips — that’s according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote presentation in Germany. In short, ray tracing brings real-time processing of lighting to scenes in a game, bringing cinematic effects to gameplay by showing how reflections, lights, and shadows in up to 4K resolution. Nvidia partner Electronic Arts demonstrated how ray tracing can be enabled in a game to show the reflection of a burning fire on the side of a car door in a demo of Battlefield V. The results are noticeable and present a serious step in the journey toward photorealism.
But even if ray tracing is the holy grail of graphics technology, its impact on gamers will be more limited, at least in the beginning. The technology certainly looks promising, but the reality is that only a limited number of games will come with ray tracing support this year.
Given that most of the most popular games on Steam are older titles that run fine on even hardware with moderate power, the added power of Nvidia’s RTX 20 series may be overkill. Unless you’re one of the very few people who are pushing the envelope with high frame rates in 4K resolution, a lot of the power of the RTX 20 series will be wasted. If you already own a higher-end Nvidia GTX 10 series graphics card, you likely won’t notice much of a performance improvement for most real-world tasks. That’s even truer if you primarily play competitive-style games where detailed shadows, lights, and reflections aren’t game-changers.
Over time, as developers add support for ray tracing, the content may grow. But like a technology like DirectX 12, don’t expect Nvidia’s vision to be fully realized at the onset. We’re talking years here — not months.
So before jumping in and pre-ordering, our advice would be to hold off, wait for prices to balance out, upgrade the rest of your system if it is that you have not upgraded the CPU etc for a good few years.
