GeForce RTX GPUs are here! but should you consider buying one?

The next generation of the Nvidia GPUs were released on 20th of August 2018 in a Nvidia Keynote. It was about time we finally got a new generation of powerful graphics cards from team green. These new GPUs bring Ray tracing to the plate of every gamer but there’s a catch. Read further to find out more about what’s new and what to expect from the cards.

Contents

What we know

Nvidia has recently launched it’s newest generation of GPUs which offer Ray Tracing in select upcoming titles. In the initial launch, Nvidia has released RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080ti while the RTX 2060 and RTX 2050 are yet to be announced.

The performance wise improvement in the GPUs is supposedly significant when compared to 10 series Nvidia GPUs, although it hasn’t been revealed by how much.

Specs

Speaking of the specs, the new cards do outperform the 10 series cards in terms of Ray Tracing mainly because the 10 series cards don’t have any Tensor cores. But as far as any general user/gamer is concerned, Ray Tracing isn’t exactly something everyone was waiting for, but instead a significant performance boost and 4K 60FPS HDR support would appeal more to the customer than Ray Tracing would ever do. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the hardware changes in the newest cards

	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition	GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
GPU Architecture	Turing	Pascal
RTX-OPS	76T	None
Boost Clock	1635 MHz (OC)	1582 MHz
Frame Buffer	11GB GDDR6	11 GB GDDR5X
Memory Speed	14 Gbps	11 Gbps

So to an untrained eye, the new RTX GPUs seem to have to significant upgrades in terms of hardware. But it all fades away when you start wondering “Why didn’t Nvidia show us actual performance benchmarks of the latest games?” Hmmm!! The answer to that would be “because you’re paying goddamn twice the cost of a 1080Ti and you only get 30-35% increase in actual performance” (sources: random Youtuber who happens to be Linus’s brother from another mother) and which is why Nvidia tried to shove Ray Tracing in our face at the keynote.

It was all a conference for how important Ray Tracing is for you and everyone else cos more FPS and better performance/ efficiency are no more a factor of improvement according to Nvidia.

What do we do now

Well if I were you, I wouldn’t pre-order an RTX GPU; mostly cos I’m broke but yes don’t be stupid like Apple fanboys. Be responsible and wait till Nvidia confirms their “Actual performance improvements” and while you’re at it save yourself a kidney and get a 1080Ti. See you folks in the next one!!