Nvidia's unreleased 'GTX 2080 Ti' surfaces online with 12 GB VRAM and 384-bit memory bus — engineering sample has better specs than the final retail 'RTX' version

Nvidia released the RTX 2080 Ti as part of its "Turing" lineup of GPUs back in 2018. It was the flagship offering at that moment, bringing ray tracing to the masses for the first time. While Nvidia released an RTX 2080 Super as well, as well as a higher-end RTX Titan, today we've spotted a previously unseen variant of this family: the GTX 2080 Ti. Yes, that's not a typo; someone on Reddit has come across a "GTX" 2080 Ti engineering sample that not only works, but actually has upgraded specs compared to the retail 2080 Ti.

User u/Substantial-Mark-959 got their hands on a faulty Founder's Edition GPU from a friend for a possible repair job, only to quickly find out that it's rather unusual. Instead of saying "GeForce RTX" across the shroud, it says "GeForce GTX," despite being a 2080 Ti. They tried to flash different VBIOSes and ultimately ended up getting the card to work with a Founder's Edition BIOS and modified driver. Once up and running, even more interesting things surfaced.

Inside GPU-Z, the card shows 12 GB of VRAM, whereas the standard 2080 Ti only shipped with 11 GB. Not only that, but it seems to have more ROPs, shader units, and TMUs than the normal 2080 Ti, too, despite featuring the same TU102 die. The memory bus has also been upgraded from 352-bit to 384-bit, which consequently brings the memory bandwidth closer to almost 700 GB/s — a notable improvement over the 616 GB/s that the 2080 Ti actually shipped with. All of these increments beg the question: Does it perform better?

(Image credit: u/Substantial-Mark on Reddit)

(Image credit: u/Substantial-Mark on Reddit)

(Image credit: u/Substantial-Mark on Reddit)

The 12 GB GTX 2080 Ti scored 9,116 points in the Superposition benchmark, which is fairly in line with a normal 2080 Ti, suggesting that perhaps the modified driver or the VBIOS isn't actually utilizing the extra cores properly. The extra gigabyte of VRAM wouldn't make much of a difference on its own. Unfortunately, the user didn't benchmark more games or synthetic workloads except for Port Royal to test ray tracing, which ran unremarkably. However, this at least confirms there are RT Cores aboard this engineering sample.

The card's existence could point towards a last-minute change from Nvidia, where they pivoted from the GTX branding to RTX to market ray tracing. We'll never know for sure, but the whole endeavor was so unique that a curator from TechPowerUp ended up adding this GTX 2080 Ti to their database, enshrining the 2080 Ti in GPU history forever.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!