Review Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on the founders

The king is dead, long life to the king! The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the new heavyweight champion in the graphics card industry. With Nvidia's new Turing architecture, which supports real-time ray tracing and Tensor cores for deep learning applications, it's the most advanced graphics chip, but the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Nvidia card has never released.

The RTX 2080 Ti weighs 18.6 billion transistors, making it the largest mainstream graphics processor Nvidia has ever created. It's almost as big as the Volta GV100 in the $ 2,999 Titan V and Tesla V100, but it includes important updates that make it faster and more efficient. You could almost say that the price is good for what you get, but I will not do it because $ 1,199 is the same as Titan Xp, and Titan cards have always had a ridiculous price / performance ratio.

There are basically two reasons to buy the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. The first is that you simply need to have the best / fastest graphics card, the cost being cursed. The other is that you are convinced that real time tracing and in-depth learning technologies will revolutionize the gaming and graphics industry and that you are ready to become one. There may be others, but realistically, most players will not buy the RTX 2080 Ti, because you can create a complete gaming PC for the same price. I've reviewed the founding edition of the GeForce RTX 2080 separately, and even this map is hard to recommend at $ 799.

Nvidia has the merit of not being content with Turing. He could have added some extra GPU and GDDR6 cores and called it a day. But this is not the case, instead choosing to invest significant resources in redesigning the architecture, adding RT cores to enable real-time ray tracing and Tensor cores for denoising, DLSS and other deep learning applications. These additions could revolutionize games and graphics in the coming years, and their inclusion has a real cost.

Just look at the size of the matrix for perspective. The Turing TU102 and TU104 are both larger than the Pascal GP102, although the TU104 has 20% fewer cores and memory channels. Larger die sizes mean lower yields, or at least the need to use harvested chips, and Nvidia uses fewer chips per wafer. This increases costs, as does the move to GDDR6, and there is a lot of other R & D spending. But Nvidia does not consume the highest costs and, in the absence of competition with its GPUs the fastest, it transmits them to the customer and we are left with a new high note on the price of graphics cards.

Upgrades of the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition are interesting, especially with the cooling design. Nvidia has gone from a traditional cooling fan type to two axial fans, and the heat sink also features a double steam chamber for good measure. The stated goal was to reduce fan noise and improve cooling, and noise levels are significantly lower, although I'm not convinced that cards are running slower. What I want to see is that the custom AIB cards compare to the Nvidia Founders edition. So keep an eye on the reviews of additional graphics cards in the coming weeks.

I've already talked about price because it's a major point of friction. The 780 Ti cost $ 649, the 980 Ti was also launched at $ 649 and the 1080 Ti rose to $ 699. $ 1,199 for the first edition of Founders is a leap forward. There has always been a number of diminishing returns ranging from budget cards to mid-range cards to high-end cards, and this is especially true for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. What would it take to justify the expense? Even if the RTX 2080 Ti was twice as good as a GTX 1080 Ti, is it really necessary?

If you use a 1080p monitor, no, and even at 1440p, the benefits are questionable. You should use a 3440×1440 4k or at least ultra-wide screen before switching to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, or you should aim for a high refresh rate on a 144Hz 1440p display. 1080p raytracking with DLSS upward conversion to 4k is another option, but again, this requires a high-end display. Once these games have started to arrive, we will have to re-examine the issue of ray tracing – a patch for Shadow of the Tomb Raider is likely to come first, or maybe Battlefield 5 will have it at launch – but here's how the founders of GeForce RTX 2080 Edition performs in current games.

GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition Performance

I've tested every card you see in the following tables in the last few weeks. All tests were conducted using the equipment of the test bench shown in the right frame. The Core i7-8700K is overclocked at 5.0 GHz, thanks to NZXT's Kraken X62 cooling, which does as much as possible to remove CPU bottlenecks. I used the Nvidia 399.07 and AMD 18.8.2 drivers to test all existing maps, while the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti were tested with Nvidia 411.51 drivers released last Friday.

The graphics cards used here are reference models, with the exception of R9 390 and new GeForce RTX Founders. This makes things slightly more favorable for new cards, by about five percent. I will be testing additional RTX cards in the coming weeks and similar factory overclockers are available on virtually all GPUs. I will also do manual overclocking tests in the near future, but I have not been able to do so in advance due to time constraints.

All games work with "maximum" quality, within reasonable limits, which means that I did not use super-sampling or resolution. I have, however, enabled all the advanced graphics settings of GTA5 and HBAO + in the post-processing settings of The Witcher 3. I have also tested the enabled HDR output in the five compatible games, although the tests with HDR modes are limited to the RTX 2080 Ti at the moment (due to time constraints). Several games use more than 8 GB of VRAM tested settings, which will seriously punish older cards with 4 GB of memory or less. I've included the 1080p test below, but it's mostly a point of curiosity – as I mentioned before, buying this type of graphics card for a 1080p display is excessive.

Say what you want about the price, but the 4k performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is certainly impressive. The minimum framerates are often equal to the average framerates of the RTX 2080 and GTX 1080 Ti, and the overall performance is greater than 30%. Of the twelve games tested, only two do not exceed the average of more than 60 frames per second, and both can easily reach that target with a few minor tweaks – for example, Two Ex very high instead of ultra settings advanced in GTA5. There is no doubt that the RTX 2080 Ti is now the fastest GPU, whether you need it or not.

Even with a bestial test bench, the throttling bottlenecks begin to limit the performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at 1440p. It's a pity, because it means that it's not always possible to get a 144 Hz display. In fact, only four of the games tested have an average of 140 frames per second . Instead of the 33% advance that it had above 1080 Ti at 4k, we have a 27% lead – and it drops even more in 1080p.

The 1080p results are not particularly significant, although they give an idea of ​​what we might see with DLSS compatible games in the future. These could be rendered in 1080p and upscale up to 4k, with a quality "similar" to that of native 4k rendering with TAA. At least that's the theory, but I refuse any judgment on DLSS at the moment. DLSS 2X is also available, improving image quality without upconversion and affecting very little performance. But if you are using a 1080p screen, you should really improve it before buying a Founders GeForce RTX 2080 edition – the new Acer Predator X27 or Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ would be an excellent match for a 2080 Ti because it's not not an object, right?

As with the RTX 2080, I am a little disappointed by the performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. It is extremely fast, but it also contains 20% more CUDA cores than the 1080 Ti, and it even has a speed advantage. Nvidia's claims of 50% more effective shaders do not seem to hold, unless Nvidia is also responsible for energy efficiency – which I will deepen in the coming weeks.

The Value Proposition of GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition

Looking at performance from another angle, here's how the current generation of graphics cards match the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. I included 1080p, 1440p and 4k results when calculating fps / $, but even though I'm sticking to 4k performance, Turing cards do not provide convincing value. The real question is: how excited are you with the fact that the games include high quality real-time raytracing?

If your answer to this question is a nonchalant shrug, let it pass for the moment. Prices are unlikely to rise in the coming months, and it is possible that AMD will appear with a new graphics card in 2019 that could lower prices for GeForce RTX offers. Whatever it is, you save money and with any of the GPUs above, you can still enjoy your games.

GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Edition Founders: A Titan killer at a Titan price

It is almost impossible to predict what will happen in the coming months on the gaming front. Nvidia has new graphics hardware with many new features, and at least 25 games must use one or more of the new rendering modes. Combined with the improvements made by the driver setting, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti could increase the performance gap by 10% or more and "normal" pixelation games. And for anything that uses ray tracing – whether it's RTX, DXR, or Vulkan – Turing cards should keep one step ahead of any other option.

The problem is that the initial price is too high for me to justify. If you do not really need to upgrade, simply keep what you already have or buy a modest 10-series card, then wait and see if the $ 999 2080 Ti cards appear at the party. As usual, owners of Titan cards (all three) will now have to look forward to the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti, then wait for the inevitable Titan RTX variant. Maybe when that happens, prices on GeForce RTX models will fall to more "reasonable" levels.

From a performance point of view, it's great to see a single graphics card that can break 60 frames per second at 4k. HDR modes do not even cause the card to flash, except in Hitman where it causes a slight drop in performance, and the number of games that can not handle the maximum of 4K is greatly reduced with this card. the small number that falls just short.

Everything about the RTX 2080 Ti is extreme, from design to specification, through features and price. I can not in good conscience recommend such a map to most people, but damn it if I do not want it. For those with deep enough pockets, absolutely forget the price and go crazy – it's the new king of the graphics card playing field. If all you care about is an extreme performance, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (ie the score) and start your game. The rest of us will look with envy.

The simple fact is that GeForce RTX 2080 Ti allows a new level of gaming performance. As a result, I find it more desirable than the less expensive RTX 2080. She has more of everything, the most critical performance. In this sense, it's the new "best" graphics card. But the players do not do it really need it, certainly not in 2018, and the end result (for example, good but not great) reflects that.