Nvidia RTX Super graphics cards will launch for a higher price than their current RTX 20-series counterparts, insider sources suggest. Rumour has it that the supercharged RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2070 Super will release very soon for $799 and $599, respectively. That’s the same price as the factory overclocked Founder’s Editions Nvidia first announced last August, and potentially great news for AMD.
It was widely suspected that Nvidia would look to drop prices for its upcoming cards in light of AMD’s RX 5700-series graphics card lineup. Two cards were announced over at E3 for the red team: the RX 5700 XT and the RX 5700. These will launch at $449 and $379, respectively, and will duke it out with the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 in performance.
Today’s standard RTX 2080 will set you back $699, the RTX 2070 $499, and the RTX 2060 rounds off the 20-series at $349. The latest report by WCCFTech by a source close to the matter alleges that the new Super variants of these GPUs, which will buff these cards stats in both traditional and RTX workloads, will not come with a price drop to cut AMD out of the market. Rather they will see a slight increase.
I’m not entirely sold on the veracity of said rumours just yet. Nvidia is yet to confirm any details on its cards beyond a teaser trailer denoting the Super branding. It also looked likely that Super variants would supersede (get it?) today’s RTX 20-series cards once they launch.
| RTX 2080 Super* | RTX 2080 | RTX 2070 Super* | RTX 2070 | RTX 2060 Super* | RTX 2060 | |
| GPU | TU102 / TU104 | TU104 | TU104 | TU106 | TU106 | TU106 |
| CUDA cores | 3,072 | 2,944 | 2,560 | 2,304 | 2,176 | 1,920 |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 |
| Memory speed | 16Gbps | 14Gbps | 14Gbps | 14Gbps | 14Gbps | 14Gbps |
| RT cores | 48 | 46 | 40 | 36 | 34 | 30 |
| Tensor cores | 384 | 368 | 320 | 288 | 272 | 240 |
| Price | $799 | $699 | *599 | $499 | $429 | $349 |
*unconfirmed
The launch date is another point of contention. WCCFTech expects a launch later this month, which is a little earlier than we suspect.
But it’s not out of the realms of possibility either. The RTX 2080 Super will supposedly come equipped with either a full-fat TU104 GPU or a cut-down TU102 GPU ripped right out of an RTX 2080 Ti. And it’s mostly agreed upon that this will be accompanied by a memory speed boost to 16Gbps.
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The RTX 2070 Super is expected with a TU104 GPU to match the standard RTX 2080, and the RTX 2060 Super will inch just a little closer to its bigger sibling, the RTX 2070.
It is also expected that this increase in CUDA Cores will be joined by a linear scaling in RT Cores, increasing ray tracing chops across the board.
And all that supposedly warrants a price increase equivalent to the premium Nvidia applied to its own factory overclocked and binned Founder’s Edition cards at launch. Barring the RTX 2060, that is, which never received an overclocked Founder’s Edition.
Third-party graphics cards may be able to undercut Nvidia’s pricing with bare bones fare at a more competitive price point.
But that’s all down to the margins. And the real benefactor of this price increase could be the same company that initiated this race: AMD. Nvidia may be able to retain the performance crown, but the red team’s RX 5700-series could take the lead in the mid-range price/performance contest despite Nvidia’s suspected pricing flexibility with Turing nearly one year on from launch.