MSI unveils first custom NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU Series

The tech creates cinematic renderings for video games.

The existing approach to tackling light and shadows involves building an image from back to front, overlaying multiple elements to achieve the finished picture. “Everything just works because ray tracing just works”. The new features deliver 4K HDR gaming at 60 frames per second on even the most advanced titles, Nvidia says.

And it all looks rather stunning in the demos shown on stage, though maybe less so in the post-show capture session pushing the new RTX 2080 Ti to its limits. In short, ray tracing technology is capable of more realistic global illumination and accurate projections of ambient light, and affords the ability to efficiently calculate the reflections and light sources that exist outside of the screen space. Even by Nvidia’s flagship GPU standards, this was a very high price tag, but for many people the pure gaming performance of the GTX 1080 Ti was well worth it.

This story is still developing, and specs on these graphics cards were not available at the time of writing. The RTX 2070 card comes with the same memory configuration at the RTX 2080, only sporting a handful fewer CUDA cores; 2,304 to be exact. A Founders Edition of the card runs at a top speed of 1,800MHz, while the vanilla card hits 1,710MHz.

Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX series graphics cards are based on the company’s brand-new Turing architecture, which it revealed last week at Siggraph with the launch of the company’s Quadro RTX workstation graphics cards.

NVIDIA is working with developers such as EA, Epic Games, Square Enix on games with ray tracing.

“Turing is NVIDIA’s most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade”, said Justin Walker, director of GeForce desktop at NVIDIA, in the release. There is also a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition which features an overclocked boost of 1,635MHz. You can also pre-order the special “Founders Edition” of each card on Nvidia’s site.

Graphics cards from partner brands including Zotac, Asus, MSI and others featuring the new GeForce RTX GPUs will be priced starting at $499 (approximately Rs. 34,828) for the GeForce RTX 2070, $699 (approximately Rs. 48,787) for the GeForce RTX 2080, and $999 (approximately Rs. 69,725) for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. We are not certain why this is happening but so far most games that were showcased are using ray tracing for very specific things, and nearly none of them uses it for more than one effect.