If I hadn’t tell you right here you probably would’ve missed the fact that we’re talking about GeForce GTX 2080 Ti, not the RTX 2080 Ti that led NVIDIA Turing-based GPUs eventually. Yes, the card was originally branded under GTX, but a seemingly last-minute change (and to market its ray tracing feature) has forever changed the branding for Team Green since then.
GeForce GTX 2080 Ti, Not RTX 2080 Ti
This particular card was bought on Facebook Marketplace for a reasonable price of $500 (RM2,113) according to this Redditor (via Videocardz), and it turns out the original prototype has more differences than what was originally thought. Besides the branding, the TU102 silicon was matched with an extra gigabyte of VRAM – 12GB of them to be exact, paired with 384-bit bus. For reference, the retail version of RTX 2080 Ti featured 11GB of GDDR6 VRAM via a slightly narrower 352-bit bus.
While another prototype GTX 2080 Ti appeared earlier this month – according to Videocardz’s findings – that model was effectively inoperative as it didn’t have a working vBIOS available. This model seemingly has better luck, given that it managed to register itself on GPU-Z validation, so running games on it is theoretically possible; it is running on retail driver based on the version too, as shown above.
It’s worth noting that RTX 2080 Ti was launched several months after the RTX rebrand, which suggests that the existence of this prototype proved that NVIDIA already had this model in mind before RTX branding was applied to initial Turing-based models, like the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 (which also had GTX-branded prototypes spotted throughout the years).
Pokdepinion: A unique piece of history, given that this is possibly the last GTX card ever seen.
