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
Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)
Now a truly venerable title, GTA V is a veteran of past game suites that is still graphically demanding as they come. As an older DX11 title, it provides a glimpse into the graphically intensive games of yesteryear that don't incorporate the latest features. Originally released for consoles in 2013, the PC port came with a slew of graphical enhancements and options. Just as importantly, GTA V includes a rather intensive and informative built-in benchmark, somewhat uncommon in open-world games.
The settings are identical to its previous appearances, which are custom as GTA V does not have presets. To recap, a "Very High" quality is used, where all primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, except grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced rendering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
| GTA V | 1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
| 99th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
There was an interesting issue during testing that affected the RTX cards at 4K; running the benchmark would result in a blank screen for the entirety of the run. The image would appear with Alt+Enter to put it in windowed mode, but disappear again back in fullscreen. An external overlay resolved the issue, but performance results were identical either way. We really didn't have time to investigate thoroughly, but GTA V, especially with Social Club, can be quite finicky and I hesitate to call it a driver bug without digging into it more.
It's a testament to both GTA V and the nature of graphics optimization work that a GeForce card can only now average 60fps. Even still, it's restricted to the RTX 2080 Ti performance tier, which is roughly where the Titan V stands as well. Regardless, the results represent the performance scenario that NVIDIA is ultimately hoping to avoid: the 1080 Ti exceeding the 2080 in performance even with the Founders Edition tweaks. At this point, the 1080 Ti is a mature card and the offerings will skew towards tried-and-true halo custom cards, factory overclocked and well-cooled. Plain performance regression in reference settings is not something the RTX 2080 can easily afford with the higher price - Founders Edition or otherwise.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
337 Comments
View All Comments
Holliday75 - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Good thing there are cops around to keep me honest. If they weren't I'd go on a murder spree and blame them for it.Yojimbo - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
It's NVIDIA making a conscious decision to spend its engineering resources on innovating and implementing new technologies that will shift the future of gaming instead of spending that energy and die space on increasing performance as much as it can in today's titles. If NVIDIA left out the RT cores and other new technologies they could have easily increased performance 50 or 60% in legacy technologies by building chips bigger than Pascal but smaller than Turing, while increasing prices only moderately. Then everyone would be happy getting a card that would be leading them into a gaming torpor. In a few years when everyone is capable of running at 4k and over 60 fps they'd get bored and wonder why the industry were going nowhere.NikosD - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
nVidia has done the same thing in the past, introducing new technologies and platforms like tesselation, PhysX, HairWorks, GameWorks, GPP etc.All of these were proved to be just tricks in order to kill competition, like always, which nowadays means to kill AMD.
Pseudoraytracing is not an innovation or something mandatory for gaming.
It's just another premature technology that the opponent doesn't have in order to be nVidia unique again with huge cost for the consumer and performance regression.
I repeat.
Skip that Turing fraud.
maximumGPU - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
i don't think it's fair to compare ray tracing to HairWorks...ray tracing is a superior way to render graphics compared to rasterisation, there's no question about this.
Lolimaster - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
But with what, nvidia RTX only do it on a small part of a FRAME, on selected scenes. On tensor core repurposed for that.You will need tensor cores in the 100's to make nvidia implementation more "wowish", 1000's to actually talk about raytracing being a thing.
Consoles dictate gaming progress, AMD holds that.
Lolimaster - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
Exactly, to start talking about actual raytracing or at least most of the parts of a scene, we need 10-100x the current gpu performance.Yojimbo - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
GPP was a partner promotion program. Hairworks is part of Gameworks. PhysX is part of Gameworks. Gameworks is not a trick, and neither is the PhysX part of it. But neither of them compare to ray tracing. Maybe you should like up what the word "pseudo" means, because you're using it wrong.In 1 year or a year and a half AMD will have their own ray tracing acceleration hardware and then you'll be all in on it.
As for killing AMD, NVIDIA are not interested in it. It wouldn't be good for them, anyway. NVIDIA are, however, interested in building their platform and market dominance.
Yojimbo - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
Edit: look up*Eris_Floralia - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
I've read all ur comments and still struggle to find any consistent logic.eva02langley - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Nvidia is throwing down the throat of gamers Ray Tracing development. We are paying for something that we didn't even wanted at first.You didn't even know about Ray Tracing and DLSS before it was announced. You are just drinking the coolaid unlike many of us who stand out and raging against these INDECENT prices.