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
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
| Wolfenstein II | 1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 99th Percentile |  |
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I am actually impressed with Wolfenstein II and its Vulkan implementation more than the absurd 250+ framerates, if only because many other games hold back the GPU because of the occurring CPU bottleneck. In DOOM, there was a hard 200fps cap because of engine/implementation limitations, a bit of a corner case, but manufacturers make 240Hz monitors nowadays, too. On a GPU performance profiling side, of course, reducing the CPU bottleneck makes comparing powerful GPUs much easier at 1080p, and with a better signal-to-noise than at 4K.
This is combined with the fact that at 4K, the 20 series are looking a huge 60 to 68% lead over the 10 series, and we'll be cross-referencing these performance deltas with other sections of the game. Even in the case of a 'flat-track bully' scenario where the 2080 Ti is running up the score, the 2080 Ti's speed compared to the 2080 is somewhat less than expected at 24 to 27%. It's a somewhat intriguing result for an optimized Vulkan game, as the game runs and scales generally well across the board; It's also not unnoticed that both the RX Vega cards and GeForce Turing cards outperform their expected positions, though without the graphics workload details it's hard to speculate with substance. With framerates like these, the 4K HDR dream at 144 Hz is a real possibility, and it would be interesting to compare with Titan V and Titan Xp results.
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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.