Seven years back, right before NVIDIA rolled out its Turing architecture, the company made a significant shift in the naming convention of its new graphics - card series. It switched from 'GTX 20' to 'RTX 20', ushering in a new era of ray - tracing technology. Even though the name was changed, a handful of trial - production cards bearing the GTX prefix still managed to slip out. Among them were engineering sample cards of the GTX 2070 and GTX 2080. Recently, the highly anticipated flagship GTX 2080 Ti prototype card has finally made its debut.

This card was shared by a Reddit user named SubstantialMark959. It was discovered that when his friend took the card in for repair, it couldn't output any images. This fact confirmed that it was indeed an engineering sample. The BIOS screenshot reveals a development date of July 15, 2018. It also shows a motherboard number of PG150 and an SKU of 30, which are in line with the specifications of the later - released RTX 2080 Ti. When the user tried to flash the RTX 2080 Ti BIOS onto the card, the attempt failed. It's likely due to changes in the SubID or the circuit definitions.