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Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 joins the ray tracing future on October 17 for $499

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RTX 2080
Riley Young/Digital Trends

If Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti is a bit too rich for your gaming blood, you can pick up the RTX 2070 next month instead. Nvidia announced through its GeForce Twitter account that the RTX 2070 will be available on October 17 at a starting price of $499. If you opt for the Founders Edition card, that version will cost $100 more at $599. Like the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti flagship, the RTX 2070 will utilize Nvidia’s new Turing architecture, which will support artificial intelligence-enhanced features, ray tracing, and Deep Learning Super Sampling.

While the RTX 2070 represents a more affordable option for gamers compared to the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti flagships, it may not be an immediate upgrade compared to the aging GeForce GTX series. In our early benchmarks of both the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti with current games, we found that the RTX 2080 delivers performance that’s about on par with the GTX 1080. For its part, Nvidia claims that the new RTX series should be capable of up to six times the performance of the GTX platform. However, for this performance to become a reality, you need to wait for games that support ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). And at this time, it’s unclear if ray tracing games will be available when the RTX 2070 launches in October. Without ray tracing and DLSS, gamers won’t be able to realize the card’s full potential.

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Nvidia is placing huge bets on ray tracing as the future of gaming. The feature allows scenes to be rendered in real time, showing how light can be absorbed, reflected, or refracted off of surfaces. The effect is similar to computer-generated imagery, or CGI, in movies. In games, Nvidia claims that this will lead to more realistic scenes and animations. However, if you don’t need ray tracing, you may get better bang for your buck by finding a GTX series cards that are being discounted now that the RTX series are starting to arrive.

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If you’re interested in investing in Nvidia’s vision for the future of gaming, you can sign up on the dedicated GeForce RTX 2070 portal to be notified when pre-orders go live.

October is shaping up to be a big month for the PC industry. In addition to the RTX 2070 hitting shelves, Microsoft is also slated to take the wraps off of the next major update to Windows 10, which the company is aptly calling the October 2018 Update.

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Chuong Nguyen
Chuong Nguyen
Computing Writer
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
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