News Nvidia's GeForce GTX 2080 Prototype Shows Up In The Wild

[Admin]

Out of nowhere, a "GTX 2080" prototype has surfaced online. It gives us a clue that Nvidia was considering extending its GTX 16 series lineup into an 80 series product.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 2080 Prototype Shows Up In The Wild : Read more

 

[hotaru251]

even a GTX 2000 series wouldnt of been successful.

the performance gain from 1080 ti was just not worth it for cost of 2000 series.
and w/o the RTX niche it would be an overpriced gpu and save $ and get a 1080 ti instead.

they should have released RTX 2080 (due to bleeding edge niche with little usage at launch) & had the rest of lineup GTX. (as only 2080 had actual usable ray tracing performance) would of kept sales fine & of shown off ray tracing for the next generation of cards.

 

[spongiemaster]

even a GTX 2000 series wouldnt of been successful.

the performance gain from 1080 ti was just not worth it for cost of 2000 series.
and w/o the RTX niche it would be an overpriced gpu and save $ and get a 1080 ti instead.

100% of GPU owners at the time didn't own a 1080Ti. The pool of new 1080Ti at reasonable prices dried up pretty quickly after Turing's launch. Also, the 2080 pulled away from the 1080Ti pretty decently as time went on.

 

[edzieba]

It's clear why Nvidia did not go down this route: the per-die cost would have been identical to the RTX 20xx series, so the only way to have been able to sell them for a lower cost would have been to harvest dies that only had defects within the RT core and tensor core area specifically. That's only a small proportion of total die area (IIRC under 20% total die area) so this would have been an exceptionally small supply of dies which could have been used for a notional 'GTX 20xx" card but not instead used for a RTX card lower down the scale (e.g. GTX2080 vs. RTX 2060).
Offering a very short supply of cards that performed 'the same' in older games at a lower price point would have left Nvidia either facing the gibbering masses accusing them of deliberately manufacturing fewer of the 'better' cards - as if Nvidia had control over defect placement during fabbing - or selling the same die without defects as a fused-off GTX card rather than a full-featured RTX card, and losing money on it.
In the end, demand for the RTX series proved not to be an issue, and DLSS and RT have been widely adopted.

 

[Krotow]

Another way how to sell binning leftovers with faulty RT cores. Actually why not if price is right.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Really it would depend on the prices. Going into the pandemic, gamers and people who keep up with tech news could feel something was coming, a GTX 2080 at RTX 2070 prices would have sold like hotcakes. Overall Turing didn't offer anything for current 1000 series users to upgrade from, but I came from a Radeon Fury Nano and the extra performance with the tradeoff of RTX features would have been a no brainer.

 

[cryoburner]

This prototype proves that Nvidia was thinking about launching a GTX lineup of Turing-based cards beyond the GTX 1660 Ti.

Or not. It could just be an engineering sample from before Nvidia revealed that the 20-series would have raytracing hardware, to help minimize potential leaks based on the name.

Or perhaps more likely, the original plan may have been to continue the GTX branding, but then they decided later to use a name that would more clearly highlight the new headlining features, and help differentiate the cards from the lower-end models lacking them. The value of the 20-series was considered pretty bad at launch, with the cards showing little to no performance-per-dollar gain over the 10-series, and the only notable things the new series offered, RT and DLSS, were completely missing. So they undoubtedly wanted to emphasize that those features were coming.