GoKawiilNvidia's RTX 20 series launched eight years ago today, introducing real-time ray tracing to PC gaming
Nvidia's Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti launched on this date in 2018, marking the first consumer graphics cards capable of real-time ray tracing. The more affordable RTX 2070 followed months later in October, while CEO Jensen Huang promoted the technology as ushering in a new era of gaming realism.
This launch set the template Nvidia still follows: debut expensive flagship cards with a marquee feature, then trickle it down to mainstream buyers over time. It also kicked off years of debate over whether ray tracing's visual gains are worth the performance cost, a tension that persists across Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs today.
- RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti launched first; the cheaper RTX 2070 arrived months later in October 2018
- Huang claimed ray tracing was a generational leap, but adoption and enthusiasm were initially limited due to few supporting games
- The RTX 2080 outperformed the GTX 1080 Ti but cost $100 more, with Founders Edition pricing set at $799
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Graphics Card — If you're curious about how far ray tracing has come since the original RTX 20 series launch, the RTX 4070 delivers dramatically improved real-time ray tracing performance without the brutal frame-rate hit early adopters endured. It's a great way to experience modern hybrid rendering in current games while staying at a more mainstream price point than flagship cards.
See NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Graphics Card on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: tomshardware.com — Mark Tyson, 2026-09-20
Published there as: “The PC gaming ray tracing obsession began with the first RTX 20 graphics cards released on this day in 2018”
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