According to Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's Turing GPU architecture became available to enthusiasts for the first time on this day eight years ago, with the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti leading the charge.

The mechanism was the introduction of dedicated RT cores, which handle the ray-tracing workload off the main shader cores. This was the architectural shift that made real-time ray tracing feasible in consumer GPUs, rather than a brute-force brute force over the shader pipeline.

What changed was the gaming pipeline: real-time ray tracing went from a research curiosity to a shipping feature. The RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti were the first consumer cards with RT cores, and they set the template for every GPU since.

What is unconfirmed in this retrospective is how the early games handled the thin ray-tracing implementations. The source notes that games were thin on the ground, meaning the early ray-tracing features were limited and often disabled by default.

What to watch is the retrospective value: Turing is the origin point for the ray-tracing era, and every RT feature since traces back to those first RT cores. The 2080/2080 Ti are the reference point for the whole ray-tracing story.