Eight years ago this week, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 2080, its first GPU in its new Turing lineup of PC gaming graphics cards, followed by the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on September 27, 2018. As the follow-up to the iconic 10-Series and the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti combo, NVIDIA made a major architectural shift with the first RTX generation, ushering in real-time ray tracing and DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, with brand-new RT and Tensor Cores.
Now, looking back at PC and console gaming in 2026, both ray tracing and AI-powered neural rendering technologies are commonplace - thanks in part to NVIDIA leading the charge. In fact, major game releases in 2026 are expected to launch with support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS to boost performance, with ray tracing maturing to the point where it's baked into the core technology and rendering pipelines of games like DOOM: The Dark Ages.
Of course, as with any new groundbreaking technology, there were teething issues. For the GeForce RTX 20 Series, that meant no real ray-tracing or even DLSS support on day one. When Battlefield V arrived with ray-traced reflections in November 2018, the performance impact and DLSS image quality made it feel more like a tech demo than a glimpse of the future.
That said, as our first GeForce RTX 20 Series reviews showed, the Turing generation still offered a notable performance bump over the GTX 10 Series playing existing titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, especially at 1440p or 4K. So, even though DLSS and ray-tracing were unproven as worthwhile gaming technologies, the RTX 20 Series still offered the most powerful and feature-packed lineup of GPUs for PC gamers.
Spec-wise, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti featured 4,352 CUDA Cores and 11GB of GDDR6 memory on a 352-bit bus. The baseline GeForce RTX 2080 featured 2,944 CUDA Cores and 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus. Although the $999 and $699 USD MSRP pricing was an increase over the previous generation and drew criticism at the time as something of an RTX tax for the RT and Tensor Cores, gamers would love to see GeForce RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 prices like this.
GeForce RTX 20 Series early adopters had to wait until 2019, and the arrival of Metro Exodus from 4A Games and Control from Remedy, to get the first true game-changing ray-tracing experiences. That said, because DLSS 1.0 required per-game training, DLSS didn't become a go-to performance booster until DLSS 2.0 in early 2020.
Fast forward to 2026, and DLSS 3, 4, and 4.5 have meant several cards in the GeForce RTX 20 Series can punch above their weight and still deliver great PC gaming experiences. In a way, this is the legacy of the GeForce RTX 20 Series: ray-tracing and DLSS, two technologies that have gone on to change the landscape of PC gaming. And it's not a case of needing one to have the other, as playing Battlefield 6 with DLSS Super Resolution is a great way for all RTX gamers to boost performance while maintaining image fidelity.
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And coming full circle, Remedy's new Control Resonant levels up its ray tracing with more impressive, hardware-intensive Path Tracing, leveraging advances built on the foundation laid by Turing, the GeForce RTX 20 Series, and the original Control.
