The PC gaming ray tracing obsession started with the primary RTX 20 graphics playing cards launched on today in 2018 — the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti led the cost, however video games have been skinny on the bottom
Nvidia’s Turing GPUs turned accessible to fanatics for the primary time on today eight years in the past. This wasn’t simply one other accelerated GPU era, although, no less than based on Nvidia. The GeForce 20 sequence pioneered a “20 years in the making” skill to ship hybrid graphics enhanced by real-time ray tracing. Nvidia made this new expertise accessible on the high-end first, by way of the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti (overview hyperlinks). The extra mainstream RTX 2070 wouldn’t turn out to be accessible till October.
In a weblog submit a month forward of the discharge day, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang did not maintain again in heralding the arrival of Turning for PC gaming graphics. “Turing opens up a new golden age of gaming, with realism only possible with ray tracing, which most people thought was still a decade away.” He went on to assert that “Once you see an RTX game, you can’t go back.”
Despite Huang’s boasts we are able to look again and confidently say that many players nonetheless don’t care about ray tracing. Nor do they want to endure the efficiency impression even the newest era mainstream graphics playing cards from Nvidia (and AMD, and Intel) nonetheless endure from when this characteristic is turned on. Moreover, on the time of launch again in 2018, and for fairly a number of months onwards, there was little in the best way of content material that made the brand new RTX 20 sequence’ distinguishing characteristic appear worthwhile. Early in-game showcases that garnered a whole lot of pixel peeping and chin rubbing included Battlefield V, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
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Our review of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition noted that this new second-fastest Turing architecture card managed to outpace the legendary GTX 1080 Ti. However, we grumbled about it being $100 more expensive than the former flagship. During this era, Nvidia Founders Editions were actually more expensive than the base models from AIBs. Thus the RTX 2080 FE had an MSRP of $799, but you might have been able to pick up an Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, or Zotac for $699.
Our overview of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti flagship was extra constructive, regardless of the conclusion that the “$1200 price tag is out of reach for most gamers.” The 71% uplift in worth wasn’t actually value it for the ~26% sooner efficiency vs the GTX 1080 Ti. It was additionally about 20% sooner in gaming than the professional Titan V, although.
Our overview of the RTX 2080 Ti was 14 pages lengthy, however right here’s a direct hyperlink to some gaming benchmarks that includes the likes of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, The Witcher 3, and World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. During gaming, this new client flagship would usually eat about 280W.
Eight years later, we are able to say that realtime ray tracing has certainly proved standard. Even consoles and cell video games now use and boast of this visible tech, and doubtless couldn’t ignore it with out getting sidelined. But adoption has been gradual, and it has taken but extra layers of expertise, resembling DLSS for the inexperienced workforce, to make ray tracing in any respect accessible for finances / mainstream players, even in 2026.
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Do you continue to rock a Turing GPU in 2026? If you do, or are simply inquisitive about how properly an 8-year-old card would do in 2026, I’m sorry to say that Turing has slipped off the top of our well-known graphics card hierarchy. However, the next era RTX 3070 at $499 provided very comparable efficiency to the prior-gen $1,199 flagship. Those have been the times (besides that the cryptomining craze occurred).
