The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti & RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Foundations For A Ray Traced Future
by Nate Oh on September 19, 2018 5:15 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Raytrace
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- DirectX Raytracing
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
Total War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
| Total War Warhammer II |
1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
At 1080p, the cards quickly run into the CPU bottleneck, which is to be expected with top-tier video cards and the CPU intensive nature of RTS'es. The Founders Edition power and clock tweaks prove less useful here at 4K, but the models are otherwise in keeping with the expected 1-2-3 linup of 2080 Ti, 2080, and 1080 Ti, with the latter two roughly on par and the 2080 Ti pushing further.
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mapesdhs - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
Does the site earn anything from your reading their articles? Just curious.sing_electric - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
I really wonder how well raytracing will be implemented in the next 1-2 years. My bet is that for many of the titles Nvidia's announced, the effects will be limited and sort of gimicky, and the real benefits will come with titles that are starting development now (or, more likely, in a few months, when devs can look at how the 1st attempts at using RT faired).If my hunch is right, then that means that the RT features are likely to be of little practical use in this generation, since the real benefits won't come until some point after Nvidia's next-gen (7nm? 5?) chips come out with much-improved performance.
MadManMark - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
It sounds like the 2080 TI at maybe 1440 might be viable for RT. But yeah, for the most part this is about the future, and starting to get some games out there so for future releses there is not the "chicken & egg" problem they have now (no games to use it for, but reason there are no games is there are no cards to use it).Nvidia clearly sacrificing short-term profitability to establish this base; notice how the 2080 is both priced & performs about the same as the 1080 Ti. With the larger die size despite 12nmFF, driver development costs, etc, there is little doubt in my mind that Nvidia will be making a bigger margin on the 1080 Ti than the 2080. But they want to make it cheap enough so that, even if there is little to gain RIGHT NOW from buying 2080 instead fo 1080 Ti, there is also little lost either.
milkod2001 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
It will have to be AMD who also jumps on raytracing thing first then maybe game developers will take it seriously.MadManMark - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
"Bartender, I'll have what milkod2001's having!" ;)El Sama - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
RTX 2080 not worth buying right now, 1080ti is cheaper (lol), cooler and performs equal. RTX 2080ti is a 1200+ Card that is around 60% price increase from 1080ti for a 25-28% performance increase? How is that a good purchase? Neither of them are worth buying right now.Toadster - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
decisions - 24 monthly payments for an iPhone XS Max? or GTX 2080Ti :)milkod2001 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Get iPhone if you want to be cool guy, you cannot put RTX 2080ti into your pocket :)Arbie - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
THANK YOU for the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark results. The deltas may not translate to other games but show me exactly what to expect from an upgrade.darckhart - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
But NVIDIA's key features - such as real time ray tracing and DLSS - aren't being utilized by any games right at launch. In fact, it's not very clear at all when those games might arrive, because NVIDIA ultimately is reliant on developers here.In the Star Wars Reflections demo, we measured the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition managing around a 14.7fps average at 4K and 31.4fps average at 1440p when rendering the real time ray traced scene. With DLSS enabled, it jumps to 33.8 and 57.2fps
Direct quotes from article. Price premium for NV tech that (1) will not be in games at launch and may have months of buggy implementation from early adoption and may not have widespread adoption, (2) needs extreme help from DLSS to have usable framerates. Should've been named DTX not RTX.