RTX 2000 graphics?

What does it do?

Nvidia’s new graphics cards – codenamed Turing after the Bletchley Park cryptographer – build on the success of its powerfulfulfu GTX 1000 series. Starting at £569 for the RTX 2070 (pictured), they are expensive but promise another huge leap forward in processing power. There’s also an innovative cooling design, with dual fans and a full-length vapour chamber to spread the heat.

Why would I want it?

Faster graphics cards are primarily designed to improve the look and smoothness of the most advanced 3D games, but can also be used by creative software, via technologies like Microsoft’s Directx and Nvidia’s CUDA, to speed up tasks such as rendering photo and video effects, as well as in the creation of 3D graphics and animation.

What’s the catch?

The ‘R’ stands for raytracing, a technique that calculates the path of light waves as they bounce off objects in a 3D scene. It’s extremely processor-intensive, but can make games rendered in real time look closer to the ultra-realistic quality of the best computer-generated imagery of Hollywood films. The RTX cards focus particularly on this job, which is very nice if you like top-end games, but anyone wanting a boost for other graphics software may not be so impressed. The new cards actually have fewer CUDA processing cores than before, for example.

So can I do without it?

Quite possibly, but we’ll have to wait and see how the RTX 2070 and 2080 cards perform in a range of tasks, and what other versions Nvidia brings out – as well as rival AMD’S response.