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Today is August 20, and that means Nvidia is getting ready to (possibly) showcase its new GeForce RTX 20 Series family of add-in graphics cards for PC gamers. We’re sticking with that name, rather than the previous GTX 11 Series brand, due to today’s date (20th day, eighth month… get it?) and the recent introduction of Nvidia’s “Turing” architecture.
Although Nvidia invited members of the press and individuals attending Gamescom to its event, you can watch the show right here via Twitch or stay put and view it right here. According to Nvidia, the event will reveal “some spectacular surprises,” along with “exclusive” PC game demos running “on the latest GeForce hardware.
Nvidia introduced its “Turing” architecture last week, but not with cards slated for PC gamers. Instead, the company introduced new Quadro solutions for professionals. The big selling point? Cores dedicated specifically for real-time ray tracing. Typically, this job requires loads of computational power and lots of time to render each frame. That’s reportedly not the case with Nvidia’s new Turing design.
So far, we’re only assuming that Nvidia’s new graphics cards for gamers will be based on this design, but for all we know Nvidia may have another architecture up its sleeve. Over the last several months, we’ve seen a hint at Nvidia’s release schedule for the next several months: The 2080 on August 30, the 2070 and 2080 Plus on September 30, and the 2060 on October 30. We assume the prefix will be “RTX” if they’re based on the Turing design and support real-time ray tracing.
The rumored 2080 Plus is particularly interesting. Nvidia may release the 2080 with a mere 8GB of GDDR6 video memory as an “affordable” option while the 2080 Plus will likely have 16GB of on-board memory at a higher “premium” price. The latter card will likely sport higher clock speeds as well.
That all said, we’re extremely anxious to see what Nvidia has to offer during its Gamescom pre-show event.