A Reddit user has managed to get their hands on a rare prototype of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 2080 Ti GPU. According to photos posted by u/RunRepulsive9867, the card resembles a Founders Edition model from Nvidia’s Turing generation, featuring a silver finish and dual cooling fans. Interestingly, the prototype is branded “GeForce GTX” instead of “RTX,” suggesting that it may have been an early engineering sample produced before Nvidia finalized its decision to introduce the RTX branding to emphasize its ray tracing capabilities.
As per the Reddit post, u/RunRepulsive9867 found the unique GPU inside a PC they purchased from Facebook Marketplace for $500. After some tests, the owner of the card verified its specifications using GPU-Z, which confirmed that it was indeed an RTX 2080 Ti internally, but equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, compared to the 11GB found on the retail version. It also featured a wider memory bus and higher bandwidth, along with increased ROPs (Render Output Units) and TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), though there was no mention of dedicated RT (Ray Tracing) cores.
Last month, we covered what appears to be the very same prototype when another Reddit user, u/Substantial-Mark-959, managed to get a faulty unit of the same card. The GPU was eventually fixed using a Founders Edition BIOS and modified drivers to function properly. Once operational, the card revealed the same specifications, including the 12GB of VRAM with a wider 384-bit memory bus that pushed total bandwidth to 672 GB/s. Unfortunately, the original Reddit post has been deleted.
Judging by its specifications, it’s possible that Nvidia initially experimented with a more powerful TU102 configuration before finalizing the retail RTX 2080 Ti design. Alternatively, the card may have been part of early testing for a potential Titan or workstation variant that never saw the light of day. Engineering samples and prototypes like these don’t usually make their way into the public as such units are mostly used for internal hardware validation, driver testing, and early performance benchmarking. Their existence is usually secured behind non-disclosure agreements or scrapped before official launch, which makes these working units valuable pieces of hardware for enthusiasts and collectors.
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