The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti may be the flagships of the new Turing set of graphics cards, but their prices keep them out of the reach of most PC gamers. Naturally, we expect the GeForce RTX 2070 will be even more popular as the only graphics card with real-time ray-tracing that’s anywhere close to being affordable.

The xx70 cards of any Nvidia GPU series is often characterized as a mid-range product in price with performance that hews closer to a high-end card – especially if you’re comfortable with overclocking. Based on what we know so far, it looks like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 will continue this trend, but with even better performance and a higher-than-ever price.

Cut to the chase

• What is it? Nvidia’s next-gen mid-range graphics card
• When is it out? October 17, 2018
• How much will it cost? $499 (about £380, AU$690) – $599 (£569, AU$899)

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 release date

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 will be available starting on October 17, 2018. The mid-range graphics card was originally announced at Nvidia’s GeForce Gaming Celebration with an obscure release date only specified as sometime in October 2018.

Thankfully, the company followed up with an official tweet announcing its final release date a little more than three weeks ahead of the launch.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 price

As with the rest of the Turing lineup, this graphics card comes at a substantial premium over its predecessor. Nvidia may have announced the GeForce RTX 2070 with a starting price of $499 (about £380, AU$690), but you’ll more likely find the price at around $599 (£569, AU$899).

For one thing, the GPU maker’s own Founders Edition version of the card costs as much.

For reference, the Founders Edition version of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 originally came priced at $449 (£419, AU$759) and $399 (£379, AU$699), respectively.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 specs

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 not only looks exciting because it’s the cheapest RTX graphics card you can buy currently, it also packs an impressive transistor count. Spec for spec, this GPU leapfrogs its predecessor by including 20% more CUDA cores and 6Gbps faster GDDR6 video memory.

We’re still in the dark as to how many Ray Tracing (RT) cores and AI-powered Tensor cores this GPU will feature. However, it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll see fewer of each compared to what’s available on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080.

Still, the leaked benchmarks we’ve seen so far position the RTX 2070 as being more powerful than the last-generation GTX 1080. If these benchmarks are accurate, it could make the RTX 2070 more appealing for the everyday consumer – even if it’s more expensive than its predecessor.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the RTX 2070 will support pairing multiple GPUs through SLI – even though Nvidia introduced a much higher bandwidth NVLink Bridge connector with Turing. If you’re looking to do a multi-GPU setup, you’ll have to plunk down more money on a higher-end graphics card from Nvidia.

That is pretty much all we know about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 for now – stay tuned for more information and insights as well as a full review coming soon.