Titan Killer spotted live: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super revealed

A fully functional engineering sample of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super, a graphics card never officially released by NVIDIA, has appeared on the eBay marketplace. This rare device was immediately purchased by a collector. According to an analysis of the PG151 printed circuit board, the card was designed as an intermediate solution between the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and the semi-professional Titan RTX. This is reported by Ixbt.com news.

Sources state that internally at NVIDIA, this project was unofficially dubbed the "Titan Killer." In terms of technical specifications, the prototype is indeed closer to the Titan RTX than the standard RTX 2080 Ti. It is based on the full TU102 GPU with 4608 CUDA cores — the same figure as the Titan RTX. For comparison, the retail RTX 2080 Ti model had 4352 CUDA cores.

The memory subsystem is also impressive: the card is equipped with a 384-bit bus and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, whereas the retail RTX 2080 Ti was limited to 11 GB of memory and a 352-bit bus. Experts believe the project was canceled in the final stages of development. The reason was that the new model's performance was too close to the $2500 Titan RTX, which could have caused unnecessary internal competition for the company.

In terms of design, this accelerator incorporates elements from several Turing generation models. The graphics card features the glossy finish typical of the Super line, but it is equipped with an all-black heat dissipation plate not found on serial cards of that era. Interestingly, although the casing bears the RTX 2080 Super label, the board and specifications correspond exactly to the Ti version.

Since the RTX 2080 Ti Super never reached stores, modern NVIDIA drivers do not recognize it automatically. According to the seller, getting the card to run required manually editing the identifiers in the driver's INF files and switching Windows 10 to test mode. After that, the card was successfully detected by the system and passed all stress tests without issues.