[15] On August 14, 2018, Nvidia teased the announcement of the first card in the 20 series, the GeForce RTX 2080, shortly after introducing the Turing architecture at SIGGRAPH earlier that year.

[12] The GeForce 20 series was finally announced at Gamescom on August 20, 2018,[8] becoming the first line of graphics cards "designed to handle real-time ray tracing" thanks to the "inclusion of dedicated tensor and RT cores.

[17] Released in late 2018, the RTX 2080 was marketed as up to 75% faster than the GTX 1080 in various games,[18] also describing the chip as "the most significant generational upgrade to its GPUs since the first CUDA cores in 2006," according to PC Gamer.

"[22] The GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition was positively reviewed for performance by PC Gamer on September 19, 2018,[23] but was criticized for the high cost to consumers,[23][24] also noting that its ray tracing feature wasn't yet utilized by many programs or games.

[23] In January 2019, Tom's Hardware also stated the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme was "the fastest gaming graphics card available," although it criticized the loudness of the cooling solution, the size and heat output in PC cases.

[25] In August 2018, the company claimed that the GeForce RTX graphics cards were the "world’s first graphics cards to feature super-fast GDDR6 memory, a new DisplayPort 1.4 output that can drive up to 8K HDR at 60Hz on future-generation monitors with just a single cable, and a USB Type-C output for next-generation Virtual Reality headsets.

[30] Also that month, in response to negative reactions to the pricing of the GeForce RTX cards, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated "They were right.

[31] In May 2019, a TechSpot review noted that the newly released Radeon VII by AMD was comparable in speeds to the GeForce RTX 2080, if slightly slower in games, with both priced similarly and framed as direct competitors.

"[35] In June 2020, PC Mag listed the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super as one of the "best [8] graphics cards for 4k gaming in 2020."

[50] In the GeForce 20 series, this real-time ray tracing is accelerated by the use of new RT cores, which are designed to process quadtrees and spherical hierarchies, and speed up collision tests with individual triangles.

However, due to reported faults with launch models, Nvidia switched to using GDDR6 memory chips from Samsung Electronics by November 2018.