An extremely rare graphics card model that supports the thesis of the adoption, at the last minute, of the name RTX.
In August 2018, the boss of NVIDIA makes a comment in the form of a joke at the launch of the GeForce 20 series. To poke fun at the latest rumors, Jensen Huang actually announces the GTX 1180, a card which, of course, has no never existed.
$360 on eBay
Today, however, a very particular model of NVIDIA card tends to prove that the introduction of the name “RTX” was not necessarily obvious and that the “GTX” could have been kept.
This card model is what is known in the jargon as an engineering sample. It is a graphics card designed to test certain options and which is therefore not intended to be found in commerce.
This GeForce GTX 2080 – take note of the “GTX” – however, landed on eBay, where it could be purchased for around 360 dollars by a user of the Reddit platform.
Ray tracing and DLSS on the menu
Identified as a very normal RTX 2080 by the GPU-Z software, it notably integrates the famous RT Cores and Tensor Cores, which allow support for DLSS and ray tracing.
On eBay, it was explained that the card in question had been used for crypto mining, which confirmed that it worked perfectly. The photographs reveal a cooling system and two power connectors identical to those of the RTX 2080.
In reality, only the various mentions and other logos betray differences with the real RTX 2080… which could therefore very well have kept the name of GTX.
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