Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card symbolizes why we tell people to wait for the second generation when bleeding-edge technology appears. The radical new-look Turing GPUs inside Nvidia's GeForce RTX 20-series packed all sorts of cutting-edge technologies designed to usher in real-time ray tracing, a long sought-after goal for the gaming industry. Not only did Turing introduce specialized RT cores devoted to processing ray tracing tasks, it also debuted tensor cores, dedicated hardware that uses machine learning to help denoise ray traced visuals and enable AI-enhanced tools like the fantastic Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. Turing's improvements also extended to the traditional shader cores, introducing an overhauled processing pipeline better equipped to handle games built using the newer DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. All of these were huge departures from the norm.

One day, when historians look back at graphics cards that changed the course of gaming, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 20-series could very well claim a top spot. But what does that mean for gamers who invested in the cutting-edge GPUs on day one? With Nvidia teasing the GeForce RTX 3090's radical redesign ahead of a September 1 reveal of its next-gen graphics cards, we reflect on the last two years of ray-traced games, DLSS evolutions, and price drops to find the answer. While there have been some standout wins among Nvidia's RTX technologies, there have been some considerable hiccups as well, and far fewer games than Nvidia had led us to expect. Minecraft RTX sure is a glorious feast for the eyes, though.

When the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti launched with a sky-high $1,000 theoretical price tag and $1,200-plus actual price tag, some people speculated that it simply took the place of the Titan at the top of Nvidia's graphics card lineup. On Monday, Nvidia revealed the Titan RTX, a $2,499 behemoth that the company also calls "T-Rex." Nvidia's flagship TU102 GPU packs 72 dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing and 576 tensor cores so beloved by machine learning tasks. While Nvidia's announcement didn't specify the Titan RTX's CUDA core count, an Nvidia spokesperson confirmed that it holds more than the GeForce card. That gives the newest Titan fewer total CUDA cores than its predecessor--the Titan V crammed in 5,120--but the Turing GPU's CUDA cores are much more effective than the ones inside older Pascal GPUs.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 is a graphics card built for the future, just like the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. And just like its siblings, the RTX 2070's futuristic hardware comes at a stiff price premium. At a $500 starting price and $600 for the Nvidia Founders Edition being reviewed here, the inclusion of dedicated RTX hardware bumps the price of Nvidia's traditionally midrange xx70 GPUs up by well over $100, planting it in the range of the existing GTX 1080. But unlike with the RTX 2080, Nvidia isn't asking you to invest solely in as-yet-unfulfilled promises for the future. The GeForce RTX 2070 delivers an appreciable bump over the GTX 1080's performance in today's games, too. You can still find the older graphics card on sale all over the place, though, and often at a discount.

The initial focus on NVIDIA's recently launched GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards has been on how well they perform in games, especially when cranking up the resolution to 4K (3840x2160). That will continue to be a point of interest, though it's not the only one. A fresh set of benchmarks making the rounds highlight how the new cards perform in deep learning workloads. Before we get to the numbers, let's talk about why this matters. As you might already know, the GeForce RTX series pushes consumer graphics cards into new territory.

The long-awaited GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are finally here, new "RTX" moniker and all, and well, they're mighty impressive pieces of kit. Nvidia infused the radical Turing GPU at their hearts with dedicated RT and tensor cores to (hopefully) ignite a gaming future brimming with ray tracing and AI-enhanced graphics. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the fastest graphics card ever, full stop. But I've heard plenty of people wondering: Should I buy a GeForce RTX 2080 or a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti? Nvidia's new RTX graphics cards cost significantly more than their predecessors. But prices for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti--Nvidia's powerful, previous-gen flagship--have started relaxing in recent weeks after spending most of 2018 inflated by wild cryptocurrency demand.

Nvidia built these cards for the future. So much so, in fact, that we're going to take the unusual step of not rendering a final, rated verdict today. Unlike existing graphics cards, these include dedicated RT cores to vastly improve real-time ray tracing performance, putting the Holy Grail of gaming graphics within reach. Also unlike existing graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti include dedicated tensor cores to leverage the awesome power of machine learning and a Saturn V supercomputer in the games you play. Nvidia's new hardware is the first designed specifically for the 4K, 144Hz HDR era, with a revamped architecture that increases performance in traditional games, and they're the first graphics cards equipped with GDDR6 memory or a VirtualLink connector.

At its big RTX event at Gamescom, NVIDIA made some bold claims about its new Turing RTX cards. First and foremost was that the GeForce RTX 2080 offered performance "six times faster" than current 1000-series Pascal-based GTX cards. That's in large part because of new ray-tracing tech that helps the GPUs calculate complex game lighting much more quickly. "This is a new computing model, so there's a new way to think about performance," said CEO Jensen Huang. The new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 cards are quicker than ever, but the increase is not nearly as dramatic as the "six times" claim.

Nvidia's future-focused reveal of the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti admirably outlined the gorgeous potential of real-time ray tracing, but left gamers hanging on a key question: How will the new Turing-based GPUs perform in traditional non-ray-traced games? With preorders already open for GeForce RTX graphics cards, it's a crucial detail. On Wednesday, Nvidia pulled back the curtain on how much faster the GeForce RTX 2080 is compared to the GeForce GTX 1080, and revealed some additional information about new RTX-boosted software features, including a massive upgrade to Ansel super-screenshots. Nvidia expects rasterized (read: normal) PC games to run about 1.5 times faster on the GeForce RTX 2080 than the GeForce GTX 1080, as you can see in the graph below. Games that take advantage of the new Deep Learning Super Sampling technology for the GeForce RTX series are roughly twice as fast on the 2080, Nvidia says.