Following earlier teases, Nvidia has debuted an official tie-in graphics card for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game from CD Projekt Red. It’s a special edition of the card with a bespoke shroud and Cyberpunk artwork emblazoned across the shroud and backplate, but you can’t buy one of these cards just yet. You have to join in Nvidia’s Twitter competition by championing the hashtag #RTXOn.
Following the gargantuan success of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red’s next project is Cyberpunk 2077, a futuristic RPG with all sorts of exciting things going for it, including high-end visuals. That means it will be a demanding game on any graphics card, especially if gamers try out the RTX-driven ray-traced lighting. With no ray tracing alternative with AMD, though, that means Cyberpunk gamers who want the best-looking experience will almost certainly need an Nvidia GPU — and Nvidia appears happy to oblige and encourage, in equal measure.
Originally teased in a series of tweets between Nvidia and CD Projekt Red, it was only hours later that Nvidia made the official unveiling: A special-edition RTX 2080 Ti with some Cyberpunk styling. It’s not the long-rumored RTX 2080 Ti Super, nor a higher-clock 2080 Ti, or a next-generation Ampere graphics card. It’s an RTX 2080 Ti, but it sure does look fancy.
Introducing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Cyberpunk 2077 Edition.
We made 77 for our community.
Want one? Here's how:
1. RT this video.
2. Tag a gamer who is as excited as you about Cyberpunk 2077 in the replies with #RTXOn
3. If selected, you BOTH win these limited edition GPUs! pic.twitter.com/IG2BZZCZ6H— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) February 17, 2020
The last time Nvidia made a special-edition GPU was the Star Wars Titan XP, which came in both red and blue, in a not to the Sith and Jedi arms of that endless conflict. This card is based on the Founders Edition of the 2080 Ti, so it’s not quite Titan-level in terms of its performance, but it is an exceedingly powerful graphics card and is the current best fit for gamers looking to play at the highest resolution, detail settings, and frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077 (or any other game for that matter) when it launches later this year.
To have a chance at winning one, you need to retweet Nvidia’s announcement, tag a friend with the hashtag “#RTXOn,” and keep your fingers and toes crossed. If you’re selected, both of you will receive the cards.
We’re not quite sure how Nvidia is planning to give away 77 cards to pairs of people, but we’d have to imagine it has a spare one lying around to get around the promotion’s problematic mathematics. Indeed, while Nvidia claims to be only giving away 77 of these cards, Nvidia told Digital Trends it has produced “under 200,” so we expect the leftovers to be either given out in other promotions, or put on sale closer to the game’s release date.
There’s one aspect of this reveal that’s a little curious. With Cyberpunk 2077 not set to release until September 17, Nvidia may well have released its next-generation Ampere GPUs by then. While this 2080 Ti will still be astoundingly powerful, it won’t quite be the flagship card it is now — especially if some of the performance gain claims of the new generation are to be believed.
Some early rumors for Ampere highlight how it will see Nvidia move from a 12nm process to a 7nm process, like AMD’s current-generation RX 5000-series GPUs. That alone could bring big performance and efficiency improvements, with some hinting at as much as a 70% uplift in overall GPU power versus the 2000-series.
For more information on the Cyberpunk 2077 RTX 2080 Ti special-edition competition, head to Nvidia’s competition page. Here are the full terms and conditions.
Updated on February 17: Added official details for competition and release.
