The RTX 2080 Ti sports the new Turing TU102 GPU with 4,352 CUDA cores, which is what NVIDIA calls its parallel processing architecture. And it includes some new capabilities never seen before in a GeForce card, including 68 dedicated RT or ray tracing cores, and 544 Tensor Cores for handling AI. The RTX 2080, meanwhile, has 2,944 CUDA cores, 46 RT cores, and 368 Tensor cores. In comparison, NVIDIA's last flagship GPU, the GTX 1080 Ti, had 3,584 CUDA cores and... that's it. Even though that number is higher than the 2080, the new card's improved architecture gives it a significant speed boost.

For gamers, all of those numbers really means one thing: the 4K gaming experience they've been dreaming of. While NVIDIA's previous cards gave us a taste of 4K, and in some cases the 1080 Ti could even approach 60 FPS, for the most part you had to settle for speeds between 30 and 50 FPS. That's still very playable, but it was a step down from the silky smooth performance PC gamers are used to when frame rates regularly go well beyond 60 FPS.

GTX 2080 Ti GTX 2080 GTX 2070 CUDA cores 4,352 2,944 2,304 Tensor cores 544 368 288 RT cores 68 46 36 Memory 11GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 Memory bandwidth (GB/sec) 616 448 448 TFLOPS 13.4* 10* 7.5* Price $999* $699* $499*

*The 2080 Ti Founders Edition costs $200 more, the 2070 and 2080 Founders Editions cost $100 more. All have higher clock speeds for a 5 to 6 percent improvement in TFLOPS.

Previously, if you wanted that sort of speed in 4K, you'd have to shell out for two 1080 Tis. So sure, if you're looking for raw speed, these new cards have you covered. But NVIDIA also needs to do more to convince gamers to upgrade, especially since the leap to 4K isn't a very noticeable leap beyond 1,440p gaming. That's a major reason why NVIDIA has spent so much time hyping up ray tracing this year. It's a technology that lets developers paint objects and environments with beams of light from a source, similar to the way light works in the real world. Until now, developers have mainly relied on rasterization, the traditional method of rendering 3D scenes with polygons.

Ray tracing is a big reason why Hollywood films have an extra sheen of quality that games have struggled to attain. But movie studios rely on render farms and loads of computing power to get their work done over a long period of time. NVIDIA is attempting something even more difficult: Ray tracing in real time. It's not alone, though. Microsoft also announced support for ray tracing in Direct X 12, but that won't arrive until the October Windows 10 update. AMD will also support the technology in its ProRender engine, though it hasn't announced any hardware yet.

NVIDIA is taking a hybridized approach to real time ray tracing, where it'll work alongside traditional rasterization. The RTX GPUs can use the technology for producing things like shadows and glossy reflections. NVIDIA is also using all of the power of the new GPUs in more efficient ways. New shading techniques can render portions of a frame at lower resolutions, similar to how VR headsets downgrade content around your peripheral vision.

In many cases, like the side of a road in racing games, you likely won't notice if parts of an image aren't being rendered fully. But you will notice the higher frame rates that result. In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, NVIDIA claims this sort of rendering will lead to around 15-20 percent speed improvements.

The RTX GPUs are also breaking new ground with DLSS, or deep learning super sampling, an anti-aliasing technique that relies on those Tensor AI cores. Basically, NVIDIA runs game imagery through a supercomputer, which creates an algorithm specific to that title to help the Tensor cores smooth out rough edges. Ideally, that means you can get the benefits of anti-aliasing without a huge performance hit.

The downside with all of these new technologies is that developers will need time to implement them. So far, NVIDIA has a bunch of titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV on board, but don't expect many older titles to get updated immediately.

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