Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 overview: essentially the most AMD graphics card Nvidia has ever launched

The subsequent era of GeForce graphics playing cards is right here and the Nvidia RTX 2080 is the primary to get the SE7EN.WS remedy in our take a look at rig, however as shiny because the Founders Editions playing cards are it nearly feels fallacious to be reviewing the RTX GPUs proper now.

That’s as a result of, ever for the reason that Nvidia 20-series was first introduced at Gamescom in August – alongside the flagship RTX 2080 Ti – a lot of the speak has surrounded the real-time ray tracing and AI efficiency of the brand new graphics playing cards, two issues which aren’t actually out there proper now at launch. And they gained’t be till some time after the brand new GPUs are launched, so we’ll have to attend to see the true potential of the Turing structure absolutely realised. Fine wine, certainly…

That means the Nvidia RTX 2080 must depend on its old-school rasterized rendering chops to show its price within the doggo-eat-doggo world of high-end graphics playing cards. And, whereas there isn’t a real competitors from the AMD facet of the graphics card divide, there are some very aggressive GPUs from the outdated Pascal era to cope with.

Given the upper sticker value of the 20-series meaning realistically it’s going head-to-head with the massive daddy of the earlier era, the mighty GTX 1080 Ti. That was the top-spec GeForce card of the Pascal household and, in conventional rendering efficiency phrases, a tricky nut to crack. So how properly does the brand new RTX 2080 do?

Nvidia RTX 2080 specs

The Founders Edition playing cards of the brand new Nvidia Turing era all sport manufacturing unit overclocked GPUs with shiny twin axial coolers. That means there’s a slight distinction within the specs sheet between the reference RTX 2080 and the primary playing cards Nvidia has despatched out itself. They nonetheless function the identical fundamental TU104 GPU and meaning they’re each rocking some fine-ass silicon inside them.

And some mighty huge silicon too. Despite nominally utilizing a smaller manufacturing course of with the Turing chips, in contrast with the Pascal GPUs – 12nm vs. 16nm – the RTX 2080 is greater than the already-pretty-sizeable GP102 of the GTX 1080 Ti. Now, an additional 74mm² may not sound like so much, however that’s a good bounce in scale gen-on-gen. And in contrast with the 314mm² GP104 contained in the GTX 1080 you’re speaking a couple of distinction of 231mm².

In phrases of the core-count, the RTX 2080 comes with 2,944 CUDA cores break up throughout 46 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) with one RT Core assigned to every SM. It additionally comes with 368 Tensor Cores to make with that candy, candy AI-based maths.

And with that stage of superior silicon on present within the GPU alone you can begin to see why the additional money is being added to the sale value of the RTX 2080. At $799 ($749) the Founders Edition is an costly graphics card – costlier than the GTX 1080 Ti was even at launch – however does have a a lot larger chip in addition to some expensive new reminiscence besides.

Yes, that is our first style of GDDR6 reminiscence, and the RTX 2080 comes with 8GB of the great things. It’s working at 14Gbps, which is the usual throughout the board for all of the introduced Turing chips, counting the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2070 too. That provides the RTX 2080 448GB/s of reminiscence bandwidth, which compares fairly favourably with the 11GB of GDDR5X Nvidia dropped into the equivalently priced GTX 1080 Ti at 484GB/s.

As a manufacturing unit overclocked model, this Founders Edition card has a barely larger clock pace than the reference chip. The base clock stays the identical for each, at 1,515MHz, but it surely has a lift clock beginning at 1,800MHz. I say ‘starting at’ as a result of the GPU Boost tech contained in the Nvidia GPUs primarily makes on-paper clock pace numbers nearly irrelevant. The chip will run as excessive as it might probably inside set temperature and energy restraints. Our RTX 2080 comfortably ran between 1,890MHz and 1,905MHz with out us having to do any overclocking in any respect.

It additionally comes with a wonderful new shroud and cooler. It’s a much more grown-up design in contrast with the angular Pascal Founders playing cards, and actually does its job too. It’s quiet and retains the GPU spectacular cool. It’s additionally a wise bit of commercial design as properly. We had been somewhat involved in regards to the elevated weight of the cardboard and its potential influence in your long-suffering PCIe slots, however the nearly unibody design alleviates a variety of that anticipated stress. The inflexible physique means a lot of the weight is on the bracket connected to your chassis, conserving issues from weighing down the motherboard sockets.

Nvidia RTX 2080 benchmarks

Nvidia RTX 2080 efficiency

If we’re simply speaking a couple of generational efficiency increase then the RTX 2080 delivers a tangible efficiency uplift over the GTX 1080 of the Pascal GPU era. That’s most clear on the 4K stage, the place on the worst you’re a 20% body charge increase from the TU104 vs the GP104 GPU.

But in Total War: Warhammer 2 and Far Cry 5 that rises to round 30%, and with Assassin’s Creed Origins you’re an enormous 42% increase gen-on-gen. The break up although may be very clearly drawn alongside DX11 and DX12 traces, with the older API nonetheless proving to be a snug place for Nvidia’s graphics architectures.

The efficiency differential will get smaller as you shift down in decision phrases. At 1440p you continue to get a comparatively wholesome perf increase over the GTX 1080, however when you drop all the way down to 1080p then you definately get as little as 9% with the Total War: Warhammer 2 benchmark. Interestingly the identical is true with the RTX 2080 Ti the place with some games it’s performing on the identical stage as less expensive playing cards.

But then these aren’t the costly graphics playing cards you’re going to purchase when you’re nonetheless sporting a 1080p show, or not less than shouldn’t be. You must be upgrading your gaming monitor first earlier than spending huge on huge boy GPUs like these.

That’s simply the RTX 2080 versus the GTX 1080, nevertheless, which is ok when you’re simply it from an architectural standpoint, the place you’re testing the second-tier GPU of the brand new Turing era in opposition to the second-tier GPU of Pascal.

That’s kinda how Nvidia desires you to have a look at the RTX 2080’s efficiency, however realistically we’ve acquired to have a look at the worth of the playing cards, and meaning for us the extra applicable tiering construction must be the RTX 2080 vs. the GTX 1080 Ti.

They are each priced at nearly the identical stage, and actually that’s how individuals purchase graphics playing cards: on a value/efficiency stage. The RTX 2080 Ti sits by itself, primarily because the untouched, hyper-expensive, ultra-enthusiast Titan-like Turing GPU of this nascent RTX 20-series. But the RTX 2080 is sitting extra on the stage of the GTX 1080 Ti merely due to the price concerned.

And the gaming efficiency of the RTX 2080 is nearly the place it must be to exist as an improve to the GTX 1080 Ti. Across the board it’s both clearly sooner than the GTX 1080 Ti or at primarily the identical stage. It’s admittedly tight, and if this was all there was to return from the RTX 2080 it could be a tricky promote, however there’s a path forwards with this Turing structure. But asking Ti house owners to make the transfer to an RTX 2080 can be difficult.

But with the one-touch overclocking of the brand new NVScanner integration, into the likes of MSI’s Afterburner and EVGA’s PrecisionX instruments, it’s very easy to shift gears and have the RTX 2080 pull comfortably forward of the GTX 1080 Ti. The stage of overclocking potential within the TU104 implies that even this pre-overclocked Founders Edition might go additional. We had our pattern working to round 2,100MHz, with the overclocking utility doing all of the laborious work for us.

That mentioned, the brand new NVScanner does additionally work for the 10-series GPUs now, so you possibly can simply overclock your outdated card if you wish to squeeze that final drop of efficiency out of it earlier than you make the leap and improve.

And what of AMD? Well, the writing was already on the wall with the Pascal era and these Turing playing cards actually put the very best AMD has to supply to the sword. When you’re trying on the value differential between the RTX 2080 and the RX Vega 64 you’re speaking in regards to the Nvidia GPU being round 38% costlier when evaluating this Founders Edition card vs. the most cost effective Vega 64 we’ve discovered on Amazon at present. And you’re trying on the RTX 2080 generally being 50% faster than the highest Radeon card, nearly outweighing the additional cash you’d must pay.

But outdoors of the pure gaming efficiency the attractive new Founders Edition cooling actually comes into play. The new Turing GPUs, underneath that twin axial fan and nearly unibody shroud, are stored extremely cool. The RTX 2080 particularly barely breaks a sweat, maxing out at 72°C all through testing. Compared with the 85°C or 83°C of the GTX 1080 Ti and RX Vega 64 that’s severely cool, and that additionally makes it quiet too.

Nvidia RTX 2080 verdict

This is actually a difficult one. Were we simply speaking in regards to the RTX 2080 vs. the GTX 1080, on a gen-on-gen stage, then it could be so much simpler. The new Turing card comfortably beats the equal card of the Pascal era. But it’s not that straightforward as a result of it’s not the equal card. By advantage of the full shift in pricing tiers the RTX 2080 is priced at across the identical stage because the outdated GTX 1080 Ti, which implies that’s actually the extra related comparative goal for this card.

And on that entrance it’s a lot, a lot tighter.

For essentially the most half the RTX 2080 continues to be the winner, and particularly while you throw in the good thing about the one-touch overclocking. It makes hitting larger frequencies and body charges really easy, so why would you not?

But then there’s the massive, be-trunked gray mammal within the room – the precise RTX stuff. At launch we will solely actually examine the GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 on a standard rendering efficiency stage, however there are a bunch of recent strategies that may both ship larger visible constancy than present playing cards can supply and even better efficiency.

The promise of real-time ray tracing makes the RTX 2080 a genuinely intriguing prospect, and might be essentially the most real looking card to choose for it – the upcoming RTX 2070 is prone to wrestle and the RTX 2080 Ti is way too costly. And then there’s the latent AI energy contained in the Turing GPU – the dormant Tensor cores can be utilized to energy a brand new normal of anti-aliasing known as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which is ready to ship a greater visible expertise than Temporal Anti Aliasing (TAA) whereas utilizing the 20-series’ AI energy to ship larger efficiency.

We’ve performed round with an early Final Fantasy XV benchmark which permits us to check DLSS versus TAA efficiency at 4K and the RTX 2080 shows a tangible efficiency hike, going from round 32fps to 45fps; a 41% rise in body charge all with out dropping constancy. Arguably it’s even somewhat higher, rather less blurry.

But we nonetheless don’t know when any of those options are literally going to be out there to individuals shopping for an RTX 2080 at present. The real-time ray tracing on Nvidia playing cards is tied into the DirectX 12 replace coming in October’s Windows 10 replace, and so continues to be some time off.

And though the DLSS gubbins isn’t reliant on Microsoft’s replace we’re nonetheless not 100% certain when that can first seem both. On each fronts we’re anticipating Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV to be the primary games to sport ray tracing (for shadows) and DLSS respectively.

And meaning we’re speaking about ready for builders to have interaction with the brand new Nvidia expertise earlier than we truly see the good thing about the spectacular new {hardware} in games on our PCs. And so it feels so much like an AMD graphics card launch, the place we’re ready for its wonderful wine to mature. That’s what it was like reviewing the Vega GPUs, and that’s nearly the way it feels with the Turing playing cards.

But this time I’m not less than extra assured about seeing these options getting used and truly making a distinction sooner or later. We’ve examined demos, and performed alpha builds of games utilizing each DLSS and real-time ray tracing, they usually’re damned spectacular. Having the Star Wars ray tracing demo working on our take a look at rig, with a single RTX 2080, was an actual goosebump second for me. That was a demo that beforehand wanted lots of of 1000’s of {dollars} price of GPUs to render dwell. You could not be capable of ray hint at 4K comfortably on this era, but it surely’s definitely a formidable begin. And it’s solely going to enhance over this, and subsequent generations.

The Turing pricing, nevertheless, jogs my memory of Vega too, the place AMD hamstrung itself with a giant chip and expensive HBM2 reminiscence. While it’s most likely tempting to assume Nvidia is simply chucking out silicon with an enormous value hike and reaping the advantages, it’s trying prefer it didn’t have a complete heap of selection however to cost them this excessive. The rumblings are that the margins aren’t that nice, and given the dimensions of the TU104 GPU, and the truth that we’ve acquired costly GDDR6 reminiscence tied to it, you can begin to see why these are such expensive playing cards.

None of which goes to matter when you sitting there on a GTX 1080 Ti in the intervening time. You’re not going to improve, not proper now. The efficiency increase you’ll get from sticking the RTX 2080 into your system isn’t going to be well worth the outlay, not less than not till there may be enough ray traced or DLSS goodness within the wild to justify it.

But what when you’re sporting an ordinary GTX 1080? Well, you’re most likely nonetheless going to baulk at spending close to $800 on a substitute GPU, if not you’d have already taken the plunge on a GTX 1080 Ti. The efficiency increase is there, however we’re speaking, at greatest, a 40% body charge hike for a 70% value bump. And that’s laborious to swallow for anybody.

Though perhaps ready for it to mature will make that wonderful wine extra palatable… so be ready for an nearly inevitable re-reviewing as quickly as there’s sufficient AI and ray traced games to make it worthwhile.