Even though its consumer graphics card business has taken a significant hit in recent quarters, Nvidia Corp. continues to bring new products to market at a rapid pace. 

The company today unveiled three high-powered graphics processing units that will be sold under the GeForce RTX Super brand. They’ll add more premium options to Nvidia’s consumer GPU portfolio, which mainly targets the gaming market and accounts for the bulk of the chipmaker’s revenue.

The RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super are new, improved iterations of three chips that Nvidia introduced last year. Those models were the first on the market to feature support for something called real-time ray tracing. It’s a graphics rendering method historically used mainly in film production that facilitates highly realistic light and shadow effects.

Nvidia said the new Super chips provide an average of 15% better performance than their  predecessors. Peak speed is 20% to 25% faster depending on the GPU and the configuration of the user’s computer, according to the company. 

This extra horsepower is facilitated not by any fundamental design changes, but rather the fact that Nvidia has found a way to squeeze more transistors into each die. The RTX 2080 Super, for instance, has 128 more CUDA cores than the previous-generation model and eight additional texture units. It also provides higher memory bandwidth so data can be processed faster.

The 2060, 2070, 2080 Super chips will become available at the same price as their predecessors: $399, $499 and $699, respectively. Nvidia plans to phase out the original non-Super versions over time with the exception of the RTX 2060, which it’s repositioning as a more entry-level option. To that end, the company is shaving $50 off the chip’s retail price.

The GeForce RTX refresh follows a recent expansion of the Quadro RTX graphics card family. The chips in the series are designed for the heavy-duty workstations used by designers, engineers and other professionals who work with graphically intensive applications. In May, Nvidia added three new Quadro RTX models that are small enough to fit in a laptop but still pack a considerable punch.

The chipmaker faces mounting competition in the GPU market. Just this morning, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. debuted the Radeon Pro WX 3200, a budget workstation card positioned as a more cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s entry-level Quadro chips. Intel Corp. also plans to challenge Nvidia’s dominance of the GPU market by launching its first series of standalone graphics cards next year. 

Photo: Nvidia