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
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)
A veteran from both our 2016 and 2017 game lists, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation remains the DirectX 12 trailblazer, with developer Oxide Games tailoring and designing the Nitrous Engine around such low-level APIs. The game makes the most of DX12's key features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. And with full Vulkan support, Ashes provides a good common ground between the forward-looking APIs of today. Its built-in benchmark tool is still one of the most versatile ways of measuring in-game workloads in terms of output data, automation, and analysis; by offering such a tool publicly and as part-and-parcel of the game, it's an example that other developers should take note of.
Settings and methodology remain identical from its usage in the 2016 GPU suite. To note, we are utilizing the original Ashes Extreme graphical preset, which compares to the current one with MSAA dialed down from x4 to x2, as well as adjusting Texture Rank (MipsToRemove in settings.ini).
| Ashes | 1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 99th Percentile |  |
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For Ashes, the 20 series fare a little worse in their gains over the 10 series, with an advantage at 4K around 14 to 22%. Here, the Founders Edition power and clock tweaks are essential in avoiding the 2080 FE outright losing to the 1080 Ti, though our results are putting the Founders Editions essentially neck-and-neck.
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Midwayman - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
You *should* want ray tracing. Its freaking awesome. I think the question really is if it is worth the trade-off yet.Fritzkier - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
I agree with you. Even though Nvidia shouldn't have priced RTX that high, we still want ray tracing.mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - link
I couldn't give a hoot either way, I just want games that make sense and are believable, that's far more important than how a game looks. If an object cannot be used or behave in a manner that corresponds to its appearance, then what's the point? Everyone went mental about the puddle in the PS4 game, but did anyone stop to ask whether the water on the ground was wet? Likewise, th RTX demo of that fire effect (which looked grud awful anyway), is the fire hot? Can it melt the glass if fired close enough? Can I break the glass? Use a shard as a weapon? Would an enemy reveal their position by walking on the fragments, or do the pieces just fade away because they're nothing more than a fancy PhysX visual? Can I throw a grenade into the cabin to make the glass explode and harm passing enemies?World interactivity, object function and unexpected complexity & behaviour makes for a far more immersive game than any amount of ray tracing can ever provide. A glazed china teapot can look glorious with complex reflections & suchlike, but if I can't use it to make tea than it's not a teapot. If I can't open a door, close it, lock it, break it down, etc., then it's not a door. People are obsessed with visuals in games atm because they've been told to be. The sheep behaviour of consumers with all this is utterly mind boggling.
That aside, these Turing cards are simply not fast enough for doing RT effects anyway. NVIDIA has spent the last five yers hyping people up for high frequency gaming, 4K and VR, all things which need strong fill rates (rasterisation performance). Those who've gotten used to high frequency monitors physically cannot go back, the brain's vision system adapts, standard 60Hz sudden looks terrible to such users. Now all of a sudden NVIDIA is trying to tell the very crowd with money to spend, who've largely jumped onto the HF/4K/VR bandwagon, that they should take a huge step backwards to sub-60Hz 1080p, at prices which make no sense at all. That's absolutely crazy, doubly so when dual-GPU is dead below the 2080, a card which is not usefully faster than a 1080 Ti, costs more and has less RAM.
Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
1000 thumbs-ups sensei! :)Writer's Block - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link
+1I'm an occasional gamer; I'd be more than an occasional gamer if games did what your suggest
Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
Like that freak said: "How much of your life do you not want to be Ray traced?" or some similar abomination.webdoctors - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
?? I knew about ray tracing before it was announced. Ray tracing isn't a new technology, its been around for more than 25 years, the idea might predate computers.Who DOESN"T want ray tracing?!
You can argue you don't want to pay a premium for it, but that's not the same thing.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - link
I just want better games, I don't care whether they're ray traced or not. This is why I like Subnautica so much, functionally it's a far more interesting and engaging game than most I've seen recently, even though the visuals are not as sophisticated. I had been spending much time playing Elite Dangerous, but that game has become very wide with no depth, it lacks the interactivitity and depth that Subnautica captures nicely. And re my comments above, see:http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/reflections.txt
sonny73n - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
@V900Are you gonna reply to every comment to justify Nvidia’s rip-offs? lol
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
@V900: "If you look at AMDs Vega and compare it with the previous AMD flagship: Fury, you see a similar 30-40% increase in performance.In other words: This isn’t Nvidia wanting to rip gamers off, it’s just a consequence of GPU makers pushing up against the end of Moore’s law."
Point of consideration: Though VEGA did see a lesser performance increase (not sure how accurate 30%-40% is), the MSRP of Vega64 ($500) was less than the MSRP of the FuryX ($650) and even the Fury ($550).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_300_se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_RX_Vega_series