Nvidia revealed the GeForce RTX 2060 at CES earlier this week. The new $350 Turing-powered graphics card supports ray-tracing and all the other bells-and-whistles of its big brothers. New leaks suggest a GTX 1180 is on the way, with all the performance of the RTX 2080 except without ray-tracing abilities.
A leak on GFXBench (via TechQuila) suggests the new GTX 1180 is well on its way to release and performing very well. The leaked benchmark is running on Linux and uses the OpenGL graphics API. Performance from the benchmark is nearly identical to the RTX 2080, which would suggest the GTX 1180 uses the same chip but without RTCores.
GFXBench software even recognized the GPU as an RTX 2080, lending credence to the idea that it is the same chip. That being said, it’s unclear when Nvidia would reveal the new GTX-branded graphics card. The company’s CES 2019 keynote was held a few days ago and featured the RTX 2060 alongside new G-Sync options.
A GTX 1180 has been speculated on for months, alongside other Nvidia GTX 11-series GPUs. Plans to release new non-ray-tracing cards alongside the RTX brand of GPUs have been nebulous at best, and Nvidia has yet to confirm whether this is the case. The company appears all-in on ray-tracing technology, but more options for consumers isn’t always a bad call.
The RTX-series of graphics cards are the first commercially available products with native support for ray-tracing. Battlefield 5 on PC is so far the only game that supports real ray-tracing, although games like Final Fantasy XV and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus use RTX technology for DLSS and variable rate shading. Ray-tracing, DLSS, and variable rate shading rely on “RT cores” that are dedicated to Bounding Volume Hierarchy calculations. Without RT cores, the GTX 1180 would be unable to make effective use of these emerging technologies.
Nvidia’s longstanding competitor AMD has yet to hold its CES conference, where it is expected to reveal new graphics cards. AMD’s new budget-oriented “Navi” GPUs suffered their own leaks a while ago, which suggested solid performance far under Nvidia prices. The new AMD chips would also be manufactured at 7nm, giving them an edge on power consumption.
