NVIDIA GTX 2080 Ti Prototype Spotted: Early Stage Turing Development Without RTX

Images of a prototype NVIDIA GTX 2080 Ti have appeared on forums - an engineering version of the graphics card created before the official release of the Turing series. This is an early example of a GPU that did not receive support for RTX technologies.

Features of the discovered sample include a unique dual-fan cooling system, a DVI port, and non-standard debug connectors. The printed circuit board is equipped with many test components typical for prototypes.

It is interesting that the name is indicated on the card body 2080 GTX Ti, indicating an early stage of development before NVIDIA had yet to decide whether to rename the series to RTX or add ray tracing technologies.

This prototype is a rare case of the graphics card's creation process being made public, and it shows that even key technologies like ray tracing were added later, after NVIDIA had already completed the basic design of the card.