Last week, Nvidia announced 3 new graphics cards by the name of RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti.  The naming convention differs from the previous GTX series in order to highlight the additional real time ray tracing features of these cards.  While we expect to see the usual jump up in general GPU performance we see from Nvidia when moving from one generation to the next, the additional ray tracing engine promises a significant improvement in image quality.  There aren’t any games currently on the market which make use of this feature but developers of several titles are working on new releases so expect to see RTX options appear in top titles soon.  The Nvidia keynote last week showed some impressive improvements to image quality with scenes becoming more realistic, even displaying reflections of off screen objects.

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Atomic Heart
• Battlefield V
• Control
• Enlisted
• Justice
• JX3
• MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries
• Metro Exodus
• ProjectDH
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

We haven’t any information regarding performance in professional applications but will undertake our own testing as soon as possible.  We do expect improvements to most professional GPU accelerated processes but performance could be quite variable depending on the software optimisations.

We are yet to test a sample card but these new models certainly look promising.  Nvidia are claiming a sizable leap in performance which results in improvements to image quality as well as better frame rates.  Improvements in the image quality do rely on having the new RTX features built into the software.  Not all software developers will be quick to implement these features so in the meantime we are reliant on general improvements in GPU compute performance and early indications are that the new 20 series RTX cards will offer around 50% performance gain v the GTX 10 series equivalent which is still a considerable performance leap.