NVIDIA

For some people, summarizing the Nvidia RTX 3080 difference may revolve around a slew of high-end—and sometimes proprietary—technologies. Ray tracing. Deep-learning super sampling. Crazy-fast memory bandwidth. In some cases, Nvidia's new $699 GPU is at its best when software leverages its very specific perks and features.

But as we all know, 2018's line of RTX 2000 GPUs left fans with high-priced options that didn't offer enough universally drool-worthy boosts. At the time, I called those cards "a ticket to the RTX lottery," and for nearly two years, the payoff was scant.

Like any piece of expensive technology, a top-of-the-line graphics card comes with all manner of lingo and abbreviation. You'll need a glossary to wade through the stuff inside (processors, CUDA cores, ROPs), the speeds measured (memory bandwidth, boost clocks, TeraFLOPS), and the results you want from a good card (anti-aliasing, frame rates, higher resolutions).

Thanks to Nvidia's newest products, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, that required glossary is only getting bigger.

At its big RTX event at Gamescom, NVIDIA made some bold claims about its new Turing RTX cards. First and foremost was that the GeForce RTX 2080 offered performance "six times faster" than current 1000-series Pascal-based GTX cards. That's in large part because of new ray-tracing tech that helps the GPUs calculate complex game lighting much more quickly. "This is a new computing model, so there's a new way to think about performance," said CEO Jensen Huang.

Nvidia kicked off this excruciatingly long week on Monday morning with an event in Germany to debut its upcoming GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. The RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti start rolling out in September, and I can’t stop thinking about the presentation and the less-than-positive reaction to it from some enthusiasts.

I’m excited about the RTX video cards and ray tracing, even though I’m not preordering one. The event had a lot of problems, but I understand why Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang spent so much time trying to sell the audience on ray tracing.

Nvidia revealed its next-gen RTX video cards in an event on Monday, and it has spent the rest of the week taking preorders for the cards that launch September 20. But enthusiasts that jumped at the chance to get in on the new chips from Nvidia found an unpleasant surprise when they saw the price that they would actually have to pay.

L33tdawg: "basically ten 1080 Tis dedicated to doing one thing: artificial intelligence," <--- Sounds awesomely tasty!

Ahead of Nvidia's pre-Gamescom keynote on Monday, Internet retailers spilled the beans on the existence of the company's next consumer-grade graphics cards: the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

Nvidia shares fell as much as 5.6% in after-hours trading Thursday after the company warned that demand for its cryptocurrency-related chips is drying up.

Nvidia has been one of the hottest technology stocks in recent years because of surging demand for its high-powered graphics chips, which are used in data centers and to power crypto mining operations. Since the beginning of 2016, Nvidia shares have risen 769%, compared with a 48% rise in the S&P 500 Index.

Graphics card powerhouse Nvidia hasn't been having very much fun lately. First, the company took an Internet wide beating from gamers after selling a 4 GB graphics card (the GTX 970) that wasn't really a 4 GB graphics card, resulting in the $300+ purchase choking on high-end resolutions (or when using, say, Oculus Rift).

In a fresh patent suit for the tech world, Nvidia is launching a legal battle against Qualcomm and Samsung. The processor maker filed formal complaints over seven patents with the International Trade Commission as well as at the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Nvidia is arguing that both Qualcomm and Samsung have been infringing upon its GPU patents covering programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing technologies.

Google and VMWare have teamed up with Nvidia to bring virtual desktops and workstation grade graphics to Google Chromebooks.

The project uses the next generation of VMware's Blast and Nvidia's Grid virtual GPU technology to offer cutomers high power performance from the safety of a Google Chromebook.

VMware Blast is the firm's protocol for delivering a Windows desktop over a virtualised environment to serve up a remote desktop using HTML5, while Nvidia's Grid virtualises the GPU and data centre to provide graphical acceleration.