We all know the GTX-branded NVIDIA GPUs that have existed for a long time now. The GTX 10 and GTX 16 series took NVIDIA to new heights, but the company decided to rename the branding for its 20 series in 2018. The GeForce RTX branding has since been used in 20, 30, and now even in the upcoming 40 series, among other GPUs.
However, it seems this wasn’t always the case. A Redditor ascendance22 found an engineering sample of GTX 2080 graphics card, indicating that NVIDIA at one point might have chosen to continue with the GTX naming.
Yes, we know what you are thinking, it does sound weird to hear GTX and 2080 together. RTX has become the new bread and butter for NVIDIA, but it seems like the company might have planned to continue with GTX all along, RTX might have been decided late into the 20-series’ production cycle.
The card features the same reference cooler design, but the absent RTX branding was replaced with GTX. There is also no 2080 logo on the card’s front and backplate.
Apparently, the Redditor got this card from eBay for around $360.
The GPU was apparently not used for gaming purposes, but instead, the seller was using these cards for crypto mining, definitely not the best purpose for this card. The sticker on the back confirms it’s a PG180 board, the same board the retail RTX 2080 graphics card uses.
The Redditor specifies that the card seems to be normal other than the GTX part runs kind of funky in VR with an air link on the Quest 2. The card ran fine with GTA 5, although the frames were lower than expected.
He also conducted 3DMark tests, where the unique graphics card gave 70.97 FPS in Graphics Test 1 and 64.48 FPS in Graphics Test 2. The overall score was 9,556, while the Graphics score was 11,076, fitting well around the RTX 2080 benchmarks.
Coming to the exciting part, this GTX 2080 GPU is also capable of Ray Tracing and DLSS, making it the only existing GTX card to do so.
Did a quick raytracing benchmark, and it did pretty good.
I’ve overclocked the card, and it took it like a champ just need to test it in a benchmark. Nevermind it’s unstable currently dropping the clocks to try and find a stable clock.
ascendance22
Getting hands on such cards is actually very rare, especially for the gaming series and NVIDIA reference design (Founders Edition), making this guy incredibly lucky to have such a unique item. Although just another RTX 2080 with a different name, this card is surely worth collecting.
About Nvidia
NVIDIA Corporation is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware, based in Santa Clara, California. They design graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market.
Best known for the “GeForce” lines of GPUs, they are a direct competitor to AMD’s “Radeon” series. NVIDIA has also expanded its offerings with its handheld game consoles Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android TV and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.
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