Back in 2018, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and founder of NVIDIA, officially gave the world its Turing GPU architecture and along with it, the GeForce RTX 20 series lineup. Now, five years after its launch, pictures of a GeForce GTX 2080 have made their way online. No, that’s not a typo.
Pictures of the GTX 2080 were posted on Reddit by a redditor going by the name of ascendance22, who claims to have found an engineering sample of the card. That being said, their claim does hold some water, given that the cooler shroud design is identical to that of the GPU’s Founders Edition design at the time. What sets the card apart from the RTX 20 series, naturally, is the “GTX” moniker at the spine of the card, as well as the lack of any other labeling or branding that companies – NVIDIA isn’t immune to this either – just love plastering across the product.
ascendance22 says that they purchased the GTX 2080 from eBay for around US$360 (~RM1598). Once installed and fired up, they say that the card’s performance is virtually apples-to-apples with the RTX 2080 that became available to retailers. They also confirmed that, much like its RTX brethren, the card supports ray-tracing and DLSS, which makes it the only GTX card to date capable of doing so.
As for what the GTX 2080 was being used for prior to the ascendance22’s purchase of it, the seller was reportedly using the card for cryptomining, which doesn’t really surprise us that much.
It is highly unlikely that the existence of the GTX 2080 is going to excite a lot of people at this stage. After all, the official RTX 20 series and its GPU architecture was launched five years ago, and as it stands, the RTX 30 series is already entering its sundown phase and will soon be making way for NVIDIA’s Lovelace GPUs. In fact, we reckon that the only folks that would even consider buying a card such as this would be enthusiast, but even then, that’s still a very niche market.
(Source: Reddit via Videocardz)
