Starting at the bottom, in terms of raw power, the RTX 2070 is roughly equivalent to the GTX 1080; the RTX 2080 goes toe to toe with the GTX 1080 Ti; the RTX 2080 Ti is in a league of its own. The 2070 and 2080 have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM; the 2080 Ti has 11GB. All three are based on the company's new Turing architecture, which means they have cores dedicated to AI (Tensor) and ray-tracing (RT).

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.

Expect a fourth card, likely the RTX 2060, to bring the entry price down significantly in the coming months, followed by a slew of cut-down options for budget-minded gamers (the 10 series made its way down to the sub-$100 GTX 1030). There's also room at the top end for expansion: The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition can handle 14.2 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS), while the Turing TU102 chip these new cards are based on pushes that figure up to 16.3 TFLOPS. That's achieved through a mix of higher clock speeds and more CUDA cores (the 2080 Ti has 4,352, the fully configured TU102 has 4,608.)

RTX also arrives with a lot of under-the-hood improvements. There's a faster caching system with a shared memory architecture, a new graphics pipeline and concurrent processing of floating and integer calculations. If that means nothing to you, don't worry too much: The takeaway from that word soup is not only does the RTX range have more raw power, but it uses that power more efficiently.

And that's the key here. Ray-tracing stole the headlines, and I'm intrigued to see how developers use it, but it's efficiency that really excites me about RTX.

The ultimate goal of a game system, be it a $2,000 gaming PC or a $300 Nintendo Switch, is to calculate a color value for each pixel on a screen. Even a simplified guide on how a modern graphics pipeline does this would run the length of a novella, but here's a three-sentence summary: CPUs aren't made to render modern graphics. Instead, a CPU sends a plan for what it wants to draw to a GPU, which has hundreds or thousands of cores that can work independently on small chunks of an image. The GPU executes on the CPU's plan, running shaders -- very small programs -- to define the color of each pixel.

The challenge for both graphics-card manufacturers and game developers, then, is scale. That $300 Switch, in portable mode, typically calculates 27-million pixel values a second, which it can do just fine with a three-year-old mobile NVIDIA chip. If you're targeting 4K at 60FPS (which is what many gamers buying RTX cards want) your system needs to push out close to half-a-billion pixels a second. That puts a huge strain on a system, especially when you consider that your PC isn't just picking these colors out of thin air, and is instead simulating a complex 3D environment in real time as part of the calculations.

There are already plenty of techniques used to reduce that strain. One is rendering all or parts of a scene at a lower resolution and stretching the results out. This is super obvious when you have a game running at 720p on a 1080p screen, but less so when, say, a fog cloud is being drawn at quarter-resolution. And that's what NVIDIA's optimizations are all about: cutting down the quality in places you won't notice.

NVIDIA's new graphics pipeline can employ several new shading techniques to cut corners. In many ways, this builds on less-flexible power-saving measures utilized for VR, like MRS (multi-resolution shading) and LMS (lens-matched shading). In the image above, you're seeing a GPU breaking a scene down into a grid in real time. The uncolored squares are high-detail, and shaded at a 1:1 ratio, just like a regular game scene. The colored ones don't need the same level of attention. The red squares, for example, are only shaded in 4x4 pixel blocks, while more-detailed but non-essential blue squares are shaded in 2x2 blocks. Given the low detail level of those areas of the image, the change is essentially unnoticeable.