Nvidia might have tooted the horn of its premium-priced, overclocked Founders Edition graphics cards during the ray tracing-filled reveal for the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti, but they won’t be the only dual-fan versions hitting the streets on September 20. You’ll even see hardware with three fans, because Nvidia board partners like EVGA, Asus, and Zotac are readying a slew of customized GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards of their own.
None come cheap, however, adding significant price premiums to new RTX hardware that already fetch far higher prices than their predecessors. And while all three of Nvidia’s new GPUs promise to achieve impressive new feats in real-time ray tracing, the extra RT cores and tensor cores buried deep inside the Turing GPU architecture muscled out the sort of sizeable CUDA core increases we’ve witnessed in previous Nvidia upgrade cycles. The $700 GeForce RTX 2080 features roughly 500 fewer CUDA cores than the previous-gen GTX 1080 Ti, for example, and the $500 GeForce RTX 2070 has around 250 fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 1080 despite having the same starting price at launch.