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The Geforce Rtx 20 series graphics cards are coming out this week, and from basically the moment preorders went up, they were hard to find. They sold out quickly, from all manufacturers to all different retailers. It’s a bit of a bummer if you were hoping to dive, head-first, into the next generation of GPUs from Nvidia. However, all is not lost.
Your best bet for getting your hands on an RTX 20 series Nvidia card is to buy a prebuilt PC, of which there are MANY options to choose from. The main advantage to a prebuilt is you upgrade everything in one fell swoop, so you don’t need to worry about surprises. Nothing sucks the fun out of a room faster than realizing the PSU on your current rig isn’t going to handle the new GPU, or any of about a million other potential surprises.
Where to Preorder the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070
There are already plenty of choices for your new RTX 2080Ti and RTX 2080 graphics cards, both retail and manufacturer. Unfortunately a lot of these cards are currently out of stock. Make sure to follow IGNDeals on Twitter for updates when the missing cards come back.
Preorder the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Amazon
Newegg
Best Buy
Preorder the GeForce RTX 2080
Amazon
Newegg
Best Buy
Preorder the GeForce RTX 2070
Currently the only version of the GeForce RTX 2070 available for preorder is the Founders Edition.
GeForce RTX 20 Series Hub Pages
Retailers have landing pages for all the collected 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 products they currently offer, including prebuilt PCs.
Preorder Prebuilt RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 PCs
There are a lot of advantages to getting a prebuilt PC, first and foremost being your best bet for securing a new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 2080.
Prebuilts from Origin PC
Prebuilts from Amazon
CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme VR
Amazon has even more prebuilt CYBERPOWERPC gaming rigs equipped with the new RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 cards.
Prebuilts from Walmart
These gaming desktops are housed with the latest and greatest video cards (even the GTX 2080 should offer better performance than the GTX 1080 Ti). These are available for preorder right now, and ship out next week with an estimated September 22 arrival for most models. Bonus: Walmart offers an extended 3-year warranty for $58 right on the product page, as well as free shipping and easy in-store returns (if necessary).
Why Preorder?
Since the second the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 Founders Edition preorders went live, they’ve been tricky to get. Even with partners offering up their own cards on retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg, they go out of stock quickly. If you’re able to preorder one of the new RTX 20 series cards, you can nail down a price and not have to worry about artificial inflation from cryptomining demand.
There is a risk with preordering these new cards, too. We don’t have any idea how much better they really are than the current crop of GPUs. If you want to hold off and wait until we run our own tests, something we’re going to be doing very soon, there’s no shame in that.
The GTX 10 series cards have just started to level out, price-wise, with some of them already going on sale at their lowest prices, ever. If you don’t want to take a risk on unproven tech, it’s a great time to get a great GPU.
4K Performance
The 1080 Ti is the current go-to card for passable 4K performance, but from Nvidia’s own RTX 2080 benchmark numbers, it looks like the 20 series is a competent 4K card even at the midrange. We’ve had 4K monitors for quite some time, but these new cards should be able to squeeze out the full potential.
Acer Predator XB271HK
Our pick for the best 4K monitor, this is a great way to show off the power of your new RTX 20 series graphics card when it arrives. The best part is you can go ahead and order one right now, and it should arrive with plenty of time to spare.
ASUS ROG Swift PG27U 4K HDR 144Hz Display
This is one of two 4K displays with an overclocked 144Hz refresh rate. It’s expensive and enormous, but it’s absolutely gorgeous. Since no one has gone hands-on with the 2080 Ti in testing yet, we don’t even know if 144fps gaming is possible at 4K yet, but if you have a lot of cash to burn, this is a good way to hedge your bets against the future.
Real-Time Ray Tracing
The big selling point for the Nvidia Geforce Rtx 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 is real-time ray tracing, an incredibly technical process requiring an enormous amount of computing power, something baked right into the RTX 20 series cards. Basically, it makes light and reflections look and behave as they would in real life, but this feature has to be included by game makers for it to work.
We saw Shadow of the Tomb Raider at Gamescom running with the ray tracing turned on, and it raised some concerns for us in regards to framerate. However, we’ll be investigating how real-time ray tracing actually effects framerates when we test these cards.
According to Nvidia, the following games support real-time ray tracing, with “more to follow.”
Seth Macy is IGN’s tech and commerce editor and PC gamer. Talk about teraflops with him on Twitter @sethmacy.
