At Gamescom 2018, Nvidia held a special ‘Geforce Gaming Celebration’ event where, as many suspected thanks to the number of leaks that preceded it, their new line of ‘RTX 2000’ cards were announced. The range includes the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti, and represents a shift from the GTX naming convention that has dominated all their previous card line-ups, and with good reason.

The big central focus of the new Geforce RTX 2000 line is ray tracing – in fact it’s what most of the presentation focused on; simply put, it’s the technology that allows games to analyse individual light rays traced back from the player to a light source, and only show the ones needed, to assist realistic rendering of light, shadows and reflections. This is now an integral part of the RTX line, thanks to the new ‘Turing’ processor. Demos from Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus and Battlefield V showed realistic representations of shadows, lighting a room with global illumination, and most impressively in the case of BFV, the realistic reflections of fire and explosions off every part of a scene, including off of the wood of soldiers’ guns.

Nvidia touts six times the performance of the current 1080Ti line with the RTX series, although of course it’s always wise to wait for benchmarking upon the card’s release to see its true potential. The three announced cards are the RTX 2070 (45T RTX-OPS, 6 GIGA RAYS, 8GB), RTX 2080 (60T RTX-OPS, 8 GIGA RAYS, 8GB) and RTX 2080Ti (78T RTX-OPS, 10 GIGA RAYS, 11GB). On the Australian website, the Founders’ Edition for these cards are currently priced at AU $899, AU $1,199 and AU $1,899 respectively.

For professional users, a new Quadro was also announced, the Quadro RTX-8000 (DUAL), a dual card system that features 48+48 GB, 166T RTX-OPS and 20 GIGA RAYS, for a cool US $20,000.

We got a shot of the new cards inside a rig at the event, and we have to admit it looks pretty schmick. Will you be picking one up on day one?