While hype levels are rising for the imminent release of the Nvidia RTX 2080, a new rumor suggests that Nvidia may have further surprises in store, with the graphics card maker apparently planning to unveil a more powerful RTX 2080 Ti alongside the new GPU.

This rumor is particularly surprising because Nvidia usually releases the ‘Ti’ versions of a graphics card around a year later – for example there was a year’s gap between the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1080 Ti.

According to TechPowerUp, which has published the apparent specifications of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the surprise GPU will be quite a beast, with an RT102 graphics processor, 18,600 million transistors, 352 shading units, 272 texture mapping units and 88 ROPs.

It will apparently feature a huge 4352 CUDA cores. For reference, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has 3584. It’s also rumored to have 11GB of GDDR6 memory with 616 GB/s of bandwidth.

A beastly surprise

As Wccftech (which also reported on the rumors) points out, if the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is real, it will be comparable to the most powerful professional Turing graphics cards, which Nvidia recently announced, such as the Quadro RTX 8000. That card is priced around $10,000 (about £8,000, AU$14,000). If the RTX 2080 Ti does get released, the cost should be much lower.

However, it’s worth pointing out that this is just speculation and rumor at the moment. If Nvidia is going to release the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti alongside the RTX 2080, then this will be the first time the company has released a Ti version at the same time as the non-Ti version.

It would also suggest that Nvidia is not releasing a ‘Titan’ GPU, which again would be unusual.

However, we did report on a rumor that the RTX 2080 would come with a surprisingly low price of $649 (about £510, AU$890). If a more powerful RTX 2080 Ti is also launching, this may be the reason Nvidia would pitch the RTX 2080 at a lower price.

Hopefully we’ll find out more at Nvidia’s Gamescom press event on August 20.