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On Reddit, a Staples employee reports on HP training materials that include a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1180. Other documents also exist.

GTX 1180: Turing flagship without raytracing?

Nvidia relies on raytracing as the main feature of the new Turing generation. This makes the graphics cards especially expensive. The increase in performance in relation to the price is virtually non-existent, which has clearly annoyed some customers. With the GTX 1660 Ti, the first graphics card with Turing architecture but without raytracing hardware came onto the market today. So the question inevitably arises: why are there no Turing graphics cards without raytracing?

This is exactly the direction in which Nvidia could now go as a kind of secondary utilization. A user recently posted Staples training materials on Reddit from the computer manufacturer HP. The possible configuration of an OMEN obelisk is described as “Up to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1180 (8GB Dedicated)”. A GTX 1180 can also be found in some other data sheets from HP, so it’s probably not a typo.

Unlikely, but in the realm of possibility.

Basically, however, it is extremely unlikely that a GTX 1180 actually exists or is planned. The reason is that there is simply no real market segment for the graphics card. Such a graphics card would inevitably compete against its own RTX series. On the other hand, it could also be a stroke of genius against AMD’s expected lower prices. A GTX 1180 could be significantly cheaper than a RTX 2080 and thus dig the water out of upcoming Radeon models. Nvidia could also use GPU chips with faulty tensor and RT cores. These would then only have to be switched off, so a separate die would not be necessary.

However, other facts speak against a GTX 1180. The training documents on Reddit are from August last year. At that time, the Turing generation may not even have been introduced. The RTX 20xx nomenclature was already known before and a manufacturer like HP usually has access to the real data. However, these could only be placeholders. The fact that the documents are still in circulation at retail chains such as Staples speaks for the rumor, but it could also simply be an error that has not been corrected.

However, the presentation of the GTX 1660 Ti today also speaks strongly against it. It has been given a completely new naming scheme, which already makes the confusion about Turing perfect. According to the new GTX nomenclature, a RTX 2080 without tensor and RT cores should actually be called GTX 1880 (Ti?). It is highly doubtful whether such a graphics card will be launched on the market – only the future can show that.