Nvidia's RTX 20-series, launched eight years ago today, kicked off ray tracing on PCs

On this date in 2018, Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the first consumer GPUs built on the Turing architecture with dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing. CEO Jensen Huang touted the launch as ushering in a new era of graphical realism, though the mainstream RTX 2070 didn't arrive until October and few games initially supported the new capability. The RTX 2080 outperformed the previous-generation GTX 1080 Ti but launched at a higher price of $799 for the Founders Edition.