It took Nvidia ten years to finalise the real-time ray tracing technology found within the new GeForce RTX cards, but alas, reviewers were given just five days to review what genuinely stakes a claim as next-generation graphics hardware. We'll be updating this review in due course with further data, but what we can show you today is just how powerful the new offerings are in relation to their predecessors and to give an inkling of what the new Turing architecture can deliver in terms of brand new features. And it is only an inkling - Turing offers real-time ray tracing technology and potentially game-changing, performance enhancing image reconstruction techniques - but right now, no games are on the market that use them.
At the very least though, I can give you some first impressions of the new hardware. Firstly, we're testing the Founder's Edition cards here, which sees Nvidia move away from its traditional blower designs in favour of a thermal solution more in keeping with some of the third-party products. Dual axial fans propel air into your case as opposed to out of the back of it, while the fans themselves are also obviously quieter than previous Nvidia cards. I've not had time to look at the thermals in depth yet, but temperatures seemed to peak at the 78 degrees Celsius range on the Ti - I didn't see either product hit the 83 degrees that usually sees thermal throttling kick in.
There's a genuine sense of quality, weight and heft to both RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti - both of which share a nigh-on identical chassis, the only visible difference between them coming down to an eight+eight PCIe power input configuration on the Ti versus the eight+six pin arrangement on the standard RTX 2080. Display inputs are an evolution from that seen on the GTX 1080 Ti. Once again, dual-link DVI has been consigned to oblivion, but HDMI 2.0 remains while there are three DisplayPort outputs in addition to USB-C, featuring VirtualLink - a new protocol designed to reduce VR headsets' cable nightmare into one easy-to-handle cable. Charging extra cash for the Pascal Founder's Editions always rankled, but at least this time the price premium is matched by the quality of the chassis, and Nvidia also adds a reasonable factory overclock on top.
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