Nvidia’s next-generation GPU is rumoured to be called the RTX 2080

At the 2018 Games Developers Conference, GDC, Nvidia made a lot of noise about Real-Time Ray Tracing and their exclusive RTX technology. Ray Tracing has long been known as the “holy grail” of graphics technology, mostly finding use in high-end render farms, most famously for 3D animations from the likes of Disney Pixar. 

Nvidia’s RTX technology is an AI-driven Ray Tracing acceleration technology for Volta (or newer) graphics cards, which uses Nvidia’s Tensor cores to decrease the traditional compute requirements of Ray Tracing, thereby increasing Nvidia’s Ray Tracing performance. This technology, in conjunction with Microsoft’s DXR (DirectX Ray-Tracing) API, allows Ray Tracing to be utilised alongside rasterisation to transition both graphics card makers and developers towards next-level rendering technologies. 

AdoredTV, a popular, yet controversial, technology YouTuber, has stated that a source close to Nvidia has informed him that Nvidia plans to drop their iconic “GTX” branding in favour or a new “RTX”-themed naming scheme, highlighting the company’s Ray Tracing technology and performance.    

This move makes some sense for Nvidia, given the likelihood that Nvidia’s next generation of graphics cards will feature RTX-capable Tensor cores. Nvidia wants to champion their RTX technology, especially given AMD’s lack of a competing Ray Tracing/DXR acceleration standard. Nvidia plans to push Ray Tracing hard, a demanding graphics technique which will no doubt encourage gamers to adopt the company’s latest graphics card lineup. 

It is also worth noting that Nvidia has trademarked the RTX brand name, adding an extra layer of plausibility to these claims. Even so, we think that it would be silly for Nvidia to rename their brand RTX, as it is extremely similar to AMD’s RX series branding.