GeForce GTX 2080 prototype appears on eBay

The Reddit user known as "ascendance22" bought the prototype of a GeForce GTX 2080 on the well-known online auction portal eBay, confirming that NVIDIA had the intention, a few years ago, not only to launch its new "RTX" series. , but also to continue with the “GTX” nomenclature. As evidenced by the photos and by CPU-Z, this new graphics card features the same heatsink as the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and the same TU104 die, but the RT cores have been deactivated (which explains its still belonging to the regular GTX series). We do not know the origin of this item, which was sold, along with other examples, on eBay as an "engineering sample" at a price of $ 359.95.

As for performance, this GTX 2080, according to the results obtained in the popular 3DMark Time Spy graphics test, it is at least as powerful as the “standard” RTX 2080. The existence of this prototype testifies that NVIDIA was intent on launching other cards in the GTX line based on the Turing chip in addition to the GTX 1660 Ti. Initially, such a move would have made sense, giving gamers the opportunity to save some money by purchasing RTX variants without an RT core (not to mention that NVIDIA could have reused otherwise unmarketable "defective" dies). After all, it took some time before Ray Tracing was adopted in video games (and with a significant impact in terms of fps generated) and the DLSS technology was rather poor initially (until the arrival of version 2.0).

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