Possible Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 leaks suggest you can buy it next week

The rumor mill for Nvidia's eagerly anticipated Turing-based GeForce announcement at Gamescom next week has gone from 0 to 60 in one day, thanks to a possible leaky wheel at MSI and Palit. Photos of a host of MSI-branded RTX cards and boxes have surfaced, along with a report that they will go on sale the same day as the announcement -- at least in Sweden -- and some specifications.

Nvidia declined to comment on the info, and MSI didn't immediately reply to our query. 

The shipping-in-Sweden-Monday (Aug. 20) news comes to us via NordicHardware (Google translated version); it's probably safe to assume that if it's going to be available there, it will be available in the US and probably Australia and the UK as well. You should be able to preorder on Nvidia's site that day.

Videocardz has specifications, along with a ton of photos of box shots and cards:

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The RTX 6000 used for comparison is Nvidia's new middle-child Quadro RTX workstation model. While the Turing-based RTX family is faster than its Pascal predecessors, with a bump in CUDA cores and better bandwidth all around, the specs don't portray the cutting-edge aspects of Turing: the raytracing-accelerator cores for offloading high-quality raytracing from the CPU to the GPU and and the tensor cores to accelerate AI-based render-time decisions. It's not clear how many cores of each are in the various versions of the chip, unless all Turing-architecture chips have the same number. 

So you're not just looking at faster frame rates or higher resolutions, you can likely expect better quality for existing framerates, something that neither specs nor current benchmark numbers really convey. That said, a possible Fire Strike result for the RTX 2060 surfaced, but without any spec information.

On the other hand, few games even support DirectX 12, much less DirectX Raytracing (DXR), and Vulkan has just recently released extensions for handling real-time RT (PDF), so you may not see much if you run out and buy a card next week. One of the first games expected to support RTX is Metro Exodus, which really does look epic.

Videocardz.com seems to have a chunk of the MSI RTX GPU card lineup in pictures, including reference-design based and customized models. Turing also supports the new single-cable USB-C VR standard, VirtualLink, so at least some of the cards should support it as well, and it looks like the new NVLink will replace SLI for connecting two GPUs (it also looks like it's still limited to two, though.)

Finally, according to AdoredTV, the price ranges are: