NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 leak: AI ray-tracing for the masses

With just a few hours away from NVIDIA's grand but totally not unexpected unveiling of its GeForce 20 series video cards, one last leak arrives to complete the picture. And it might actually be the one most important one, at least for those who want a taste of that AI-powered ray-tracing that NVIDIA is promising with its new Turing architecture without going bankrupt. That would be the GeForce RTX 2070, which seems to be poised as the entry-level option for its new RTX platform.

While the Turing architecture is expected to encompass NVIDIA's entire GeForce 20 series, down to the still to be leaked GTX 2050, the graphics giant is putting a heavy emphasis on its RTX line where Turing truly shines. Specifically, it is advertised to combine deep learning and rasterization to enable real-time ray tracing that might be five years ahead of its time.

But while the already announced Quadro RTX cards are built and priced for industry customers, the GeForce RTX line will be competing in the consumer market. We've already heard about the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti that will replace the top of the line GeForce GTX 1080/1080 Ti. Now it's the turn of the GTX 1070's successor.

According to WCCFTech, the GeForce RTX 2070 will have 18 Turing SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) and a total of 2,304 CUDA cores. That's in comparison with the RTX 2080's expected 23 Turing SMs and 2,944 CUDA cores. Despite the difference in raw power, the RTX 2070 is now believed to come with an 8 GB DDR6 memory, same as the RTX 2080, up from the previously leaked 7 GB only. Those Turing SMs would be clocked similarly to the Quadro RTX versions, giving the RTX 2070 an effective performance similar to the GTX 1080, but still below the GTX 1080 Ti.

As for the price, the GeForce RTX 2070 is expected to cost around $400 versus the RTX 2080's $700. It might be the sweet spot for those trying to jump on that Turing train early, especially since it's expected to launch sometime in September. The GeForce GTX 2060 and 2050 aren't expected until the last quarter of the year.