Nvidia's next-generation gaming graphics cards, the RTX 20 series, will launch on Sept. 20 with a pair of products that'll start at $699.
The first batch of RTX GPUs, announced Monday, promise to bring "the biggest generational leap" in gaming graphics history, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "Computer graphics will never be the same again," he said at the Gamescom conference in Germany.
The RTX 20 series will offer up to a six-time performance boost over Nvidia GPUs built with the older Pascal architecture, which was announced in 2016 and is used in the current GTX 10 lineup. The new cards will also feature faster GDDR6 memory, which will enable players to run games at 4K resolution at 60 frames per seconds for even high-end gaming titles.
The most powerful of the two cards arriving next month, the RTX 2080 Ti, will start at $999. Meanwhile, the RTX 2080, will go for $699. A cheaper model, the RTX 2070, will be available for $499, but won't arrive until October.
What makes the RTX cards special is Nvidia's new Turing architecture, which can render light and shadow effects, or what's called "ray tracing," more realistically than other graphics cards.
Nvidia claims Turing can accelerate real-time ray tracing up to 25 times faster than the older Pascal architecture, so expect better-looking environments in your games. With ray-tracing, an in-game graphics engine can depict light that will accurately bounce and diffuse across a room in a more realistic fashion.
Delivering this technology has been no easy feat; the ray-tracing capability in the Turing architecture was originally expected to take another 10 years to achieve. Huang said. However, the company leapfrogged current hardware limitations by using AI-powered software algorithms in Turing to predict and render how light rays will appear to a human eye over a game environment.
Developers previously could "fake" ray-tracing effects, but this involved the laborious process of mapping the way light moved across a virtual setting, from scene to scene, Huang said. The company's new Turing architecture, however, can automatically simulate the light rays in real time.
Despite all the talk of ray tracing, the effect can be pretty subtle. Nvidia showed how the new technology will look in upcoming games including Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus. The ray-tracing mainly created more shadows around characters and environments using different degrees of darkness, from pitch black to softer shades of gray.
It can also create accurate light reflections on glass, metal, and over the eyes of in-game human characters. Nvidia showed how this might look in the upcoming shooter Battlefield V. During a battle, explosions and the ensuing fire can be reflected across the entire environment, including the puddles on the ground, nearby store windows, parked cars, and over irises of the human soldiers.
However, Nvidia's ray-tracing tech is designed for newer games, so not all will have it. Other titles slated to support ray tracing include MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and Atomic Heart, among others, with more to come, the company said.
Nvidia will sell the new RTX cards through partners such as Asus, EVGA, and Gigabyte. You can also pre-order the special "Founders Edition" of each card on Nvidia's site. However, the GPUs will cost you an extra $100 to $200 over the suggested starting price.
So far, Nvidia has not announced when it will launch lower-end models of the RTX series.