For so many years, GTX was the nomenclature NVIDIA used to distinguish its high-performance, gaming-focused graphics cards. That is, of course, until the introduction of the RTX 20 series way back in 2018. But maybe Team Green had other things in mind that could've extended the GTX line's life beyond the 16-series cards.
nvidia gtx 2080
Enter an engineering sample that a Reddit user recently bought online. As reported by Tom's Hardware, the engineering sample was a 2080 - NOT an RTX, but a GTX 2080. It's basically the Turing line's second-fastest GPU without dedicated ray tracing, and it's being sold on eBay right now. As of this writing, the eBay listing says three units have already been sold, and that there's six remaining. The price? $359.95 a pop.
Here is an image of the card taken straight from the eBay listing:
nvidia gtx 2080
As you can see there, the card looks like just any other reference design RTX 2080. But the only glaring difference is the GTX nomenclature. As previously mentioned, GTX is the line of NVIDIA's gaming GPUs that didn't have hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The line ended with the release of the GTX 16 series, which included the GTX 1650, 1650 Super, 1660, 1660 Super, and 1660 Ti.
Furthermore, the NVIDIA GTX 2080 engineering sample looks to be working perfectly fine as there's a photo of it running on a test bench. The Redditor then benchmarked the card themselves, and it looks like the performance is more or less on-par with a base RTX 2080, as per the comments on the Reddit post (though the image of the card has been removed).
If NVIDIA pushed through with the release of a ray tracing-less Turing line of graphics cards, it probably would've helped PC gamers by providing new choices that didn't carry the "early adopter tax" with them. Ray tracing in 2018 was bleeding edge gaming technology that wasn't in reach of many, mainly because the NVIDIA RTX 20 cards were almost always out of stock. This, of course, was a problem that remained with the RTX 30 cards until just mid-2022.
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Should You Buy This 'GTX 2080?'
At the end of the day, it's really your decision to do so. The card is said to perform on-par with a base NVIDIA RTX 2080, so you're not missing out on gaming performance there. What it lacks is support for ray tracing, which is basically the current gaming generation's "must-have" tech feature on your hardware.
But maybe you should consider the fact that this card is an engineering sample and not a retail model. Engineering samples are created for rigorous testing and aren't intended for consumers at all. Thus, you might run into a lot of problems regarding performance and stability - more so if you plan to daily drive this card.
There's a good reason why it was never released to the public. So only buy this if you have money to spare and are interested in collecting a piece of PC gaming hardware history.
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