NVIDIA has officially launched the new GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card, released just beneath the company's $1200 ultra-high-end GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, with a $699 price point.

The new card is also $100 less than the original GeForce RTX 2080 Founder's Edition when it debuted at last year.

NVIDIA tweaked some of the speeds and feeds of the card, uncapping a bit more of its based TU104 Turing GPU with two more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), 128 more CUDA cores, 8 more texture units, 16 additional tensor cores, two more RT cores, and faster 15.5Gbps GDDR6 memory (still 8GB total capacity). This amounts to slightly higher total board power consumption at 250 Watts, up from the original RTX 2080's 215 Watt spec. However, the net result is somewhere on the order of a 5 - 7 percent performance lift with this better-optimized GeForce RTX 2080 implementation.

NVIDIA is also evangelizing the GeForce RTX 2080 Super's currently unique capabilities with respect to its on-board RT cores for hardware-accelerated, real-time ray tracing effects with Microsoft DXR. So to sweeten the pot, qualifying purchases of any new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super, RTX 2080 Super series card, or a new desktop PC powered by one of them, will include copies of two ray tracing-enabled games, specifically Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

According to benchmarks released online, the new GeForce RTX 2080 Super has very little competition at its price point, as AMD's fastest 7nm Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT isn't even in the hunt, though the company's Vega-based Radeon VII card falls in about 8 - 10% behind the RTX 2080 Super, depending on game title and resolution.

The RTX Super series was designed to spoil AMD's plans at besting the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070. The truth is that the RTX 2060 Super was a better option than the RX 5700 XT, while the RX 5700 was quicker and a better but than the RTX 2060. Above these battles, the best card is still the RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 2080 Super is a modest boost over the RTX 2080 and will soon occupy that price range on its own once the latter sells out.

The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founder's Edition should be available at retail today for $699, with OEM partner custom cards following-up shortly for availability in the next few weeks.