Nvidia pushes GeForce RTX 2080 Ti by a week

Nvidia has confirmed that GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, the flagship parts for the company's innovative but divisive Turing graphics architecture, are being pushed back by a week - though has not offered an explanation for why.

Nvidia's next-generation Turing graphics architecture saw its first outing in the workstation-targeted Quadro RTX range, boasting of new hardware units: RT cores, which accelerate ray tracing operations for real-time use; and AI cores, which offer acceleration for deep learning and other machine intelligence workloads. These were quickly followed by consumer-facing gaming cards which use the RT cores for hybrid raster-ray trace rendering in a selection of upcoming games and the AI cores for a deep-learning-based high-quality anti-aliasing system in a slightly wider selection of upcoming games.

The planned launch of the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2000-series cards, however, has been pushed back at the last minute: While the cheaper GeForce RTX 2080 will be launched by Nvidia and its board partners on September 20th as planned, the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has been pushed back a week to September 27th.

While the delay was confirmed by a staffer on Nvidia's official message board, the company has not offered a reason for the delay. While there have been concerns over the performance impact of RT core ray tracing functionality in upcoming games - concerns over which developers have urged patience - issues surrounding this would likely delay both models, not just the Ti-suffixed high-end variant.

Those who have pre-ordered GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards, Nvidia explains, may not have to wait so long: The company expects pre-orders to arrive with customers from September 20th onwards.