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
Final Words
Bringing this review to a close, we've seen it all and yet we have more to see. Here's what we know right now. NVIDIA has once again aimed for the top and reached it, securing the performance crown for another presumably long stint. Or arguably extending the current reign, but either way, on terms of traditional performance the new GeForce RTX 20 series further extends NVIDIA's performance lead.
By the numbers, then, in out-of-the-box game performance the reference RTX 2080 Ti is around 32% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti at 4K gaming. With Founders Edition specifications (a 10W higher TDP and 90MHz boost clock increase) the lead grows to 37%, which doesn't fundamentally change the matchup but isn't a meaningless increase.
Moving on to the RTX 2080, what we see in our numbers is a 35% performance improvement over the GTX 1080 at 4K, moving up to 40% with Founders Edition specifications. In absolute terms, this actually puts it on very similar footing to the GTX 1080 Ti, with the RTX 2080 pulling ahead, but only by 8% or so. So the two cards aren't equals in performance, but by video card standrads they're incredibly close, especially as that level of difference is where factory overclocked cards can equal their silicon superiors. It's also around the level where we expect that cards might 'trade blows', and in fact this does happen in Ashes of the Singularity and GTA V. As a point of comparison, we saw the GTX 1080 Ti at launch come in around 32% faster than the GTX 1080 at 4K.
Meaning that, in other words, the RTX 2080 has GTX 1080 Ti tier conventional performance, mildly faster by single % in our games at 4K. Naturally, under workloads that take advantage of RT Cores or Tensor Cores, the lead would increase, though right now there’s no way of translating that into a robust real world measurement.
So generationally-speaking, the GeForce RTX 2080 represents a much smaller performance gain than the GTX 1080's 71% performance uplift over the GTX 980. In fact, it's in area of about half that, with the RTX 2080 Founders Edition bringing 40% more performance and reference with 35% more performance over the GTX 1080. Looking further back, the GTX 980's uplift over previous generations can be divvied up in a few ways, but compared to the GTX 680 it brought a similar 75% gain.
But the performance hasn't come for free in terms of energy efficiency, which was one of Maxwell's hallmark strengths. TDPs have been increased across the x80 Ti/x80/x70 board, and the consequence is greater power consumption. The RTX 2080 features power draw at the wall slightly more than the GTX 1080 Ti's draw, while the RTX 2080 Ti's system consumption leaps by more than 60W to reach near-Vega 64 power draw at the wall.
Putting aside those who will always purchase the most performant card on the market, regardless of value proposition, most gamers will want to know: "Is it worth the price?" Unfortunately, we don't have enough information to really say - and neither does anyone else, except NVIDIA and their partner developers. This is because the RT Cores, tensor cores, Turing shader features, and the supporting software are all built into the price. 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.
Even when they do arrive, we can at least assume that enabling real time ray tracing will incur a performance hit. Based on the hands-on and comparing performance in the demos, which we were not able to analyze and investigate in time for publication, it seems that DLSS plays a huge part in halving the input costs. 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.
So where does that leave things? For traditional performance, both RTX cards line up with current NVIDIA offerings, giving a straightforward point-of-reference for gamers. The observed performance delta between the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition is at a level achievable by the Titan Xp or overclocked custom GTX 1080 Ti’s. Meanwhile, NVIDIA mentioned that the RTX 2080 Ti should be equal to or faster than the Titan V, and while we currently do not have the card on hand to confirm this, the performance difference from when we did review that card is in-line with NVIDIA's statements.
The easier takeaway is that these cards would not be a good buy for GTX 1080 Ti owners, as the RTX 2080 would be a sidegrade and the RTX 2080 Ti would be offering 37% more performance for $1200, a performance difference akin upgrading to a GTX 1080 Ti from a GTX 1080. For prospective buyers in general, it largely depends on how long the GTX 1080 Ti will be on shelves, because as it stands, the RTX 2080 is around $90 more expensive and less likely to be in stock. Looking to the RTX 2080 Ti, diminishing returns start to kick in, where paying 43% or 50% more gets you 27-28% more performance.
The benefits of the new hardware cannot be captured in our standard benchmarks alone. The DXR ecosystem is in its adolescence, if not infancy. Of course, NVIDIA is hardly a passive player in this. The GeForce RTX initiative is a key inflection point in NVIDIA's new push to change and mold computer graphics and gaming, and it's highly unlikely that anything about this launch wasn't completely deliberate. There was a conscious decision to launch the cards now, basically as soon as was practically possible. Even waiting a month might align with a few DXR and DLSS supporting games out at launch, though at the cost of missing the prime holiday window.
Taking a step back, we should highlight NVIDIA's technological achievement here: real time ray tracing in games. Even with all the caveats and potentially significant performance costs, not only was the feat achieved but implemented, and not with proofs-of-concept but with full-fledged AA and AAA games. Today is a milestone from a purely academic view of computer graphics.
But as we alluded to in the Turing architecture deep dive, graphics engineers and developers, and the consumers that purchase the fruits of their labor, are all playing different roles in pursuing the real time ray tracing dream. So NVIDIA needs a strong buy-in from the consumers, while the developers might need much less convincing. Ultimately, gamers can't be blamed for wanting to game with their cards, and on that level they will have to think long and hard about paying extra to buy graphics hardware that is priced extra with features that aren't yet applicable to real-world gaming, and yet only provides performance comparable to previous generation video cards.
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eddman - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
It still doesn't justify their prices. Great cards, finally ray-tracing for games, horribly cutthroat prices.Yojimbo - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
So don't buy it, eddman. In the end the only real justification for prices is what people are willing to pay. If one isn't able to make a product cheaply enough for it to be sold for what people are willing to pay then the product is a bad product.I don't understand why you are so worried about the price. Or why you think they are "cut-throat". A cut-throat price is a very low price, not a high one.
eddman - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
There is a wealthy minority who'd pay that much, and? It's only "justified" if you are an nvidia shareholder.The cards are overpriced compared to last gen and that's an absolute fact. Your constant defending of nvidia's pricing is certainly not a normal consumer behavior.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - link
Yojimbo is right that an item is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay, so in that sense NVIDIA can do what it likes, in the end it's up to the market, to consumers, whether the prices "make sense", ie. whether people actually buy them. In this regard the situation we have atm is largely that made by gamers themselves, because even when AMD released competitive products (whether by performance, value, or both), people didn't buy them. There are even people saying atm they hope AMD can release something to compete with Turing just so NVIDIA will drop its prices and thus they can buy a cheaper NVIDIA card; that's completely crazy, AMD would be mad to make something if that's how the market is going to respond.What's interesting this time though is that even those who in the past have been happy to buy the more expensive cards are saying they're having major hesitation about buying Turing, and the street cred which used to be perceived as coming with buying the latest & greatest has this time largely gone, people are more likely to react like someone is a gullible money pumped moron for buying these products ("More money than sense!", as my parents used to say). By contrast, when the 8800 GTX came out, that was a huge leap over the 7800 and people were very keen to get one, those who could afford it. Having one was cool. Ditto the later series right through to Maxwell (though a bit of a dip with the GTX 480 due to heat/power). The GTX 460 was a particularly good release (though the endless rebranding later was annoying). Even Pascal was a good bump over what had come before.
Not this time though, it's a massive price increase for little gain, while the headline features provide sub-60Hz performance at a resolution far below what NVIDIA themselves have been pushing as desirable for the last 5 years (the focus has been on high frequency monitors, 4K and VR); now NVIDIA is trying to roll back the clock, which won't work, especially since those who've gotten used to high frequency monitors physically cannot go back (ref New Scientist, changes in the brain's vision system).
Thus, eddman is right that the card's are overpriced in a general sense, as they don't remotely match what the market has come to expect from NVIDIA based on previous releases. However, if gamers don't vote with their wallets then nothing will change. Likewise, if AMD releases something just as good, or better value, but gamers don't buy them, then again nothing will change, we'll be stuck with this new expensive normal.
I miss the Fermi days, buy two GTX 460s to have better performance than a GTX 580, didn't cost much, games ran great, and the lesser VRAM didn't bother me anyway as I wasn't using an uber monitor. Now we have cards that cost many hundreds that don't even support multi-GPU. It's as daft as Intel making the cost entry point to >= 40 PCIe lanes much higher than it was with X79 (today it's almost 1000 UKP); an old cheapo 4820K can literally do things a 7820X can't. :D
Alas though, again it boils down to individual choice. Some want the fastest possible and if they can afford it then that's up to them, it's their free choice, we don't have the right to tell people they shouldn't buy these cards. It's their money afterall (anything else is communism). It is though an unfortunate reality that if the cards do sell well then NVIDIA will know they can maintain this higher priced and more feature restricted strategy, while selling the premium parts to Enterprise. Btw, it amazes me how people keep comparing the 2080 to the 1080 Ti even though the former has less RAM; how is that an upgrade in the product stack? (people will respond with ray tracing! Ray tracing! A feature which can't be used yet and runs too slow to be useful anyway, and with an initial implementation that's a pretty crippled implementation of the idea aswell).And why doesn't the 2080 Ti have more than 11GB? It really should, unless NVIDIA figures that if they can indeed push people back to 1080p then 11GB is enough anyway, which would be ironic.
I'm just going to look for a used 1080 Ti, more than enough for my needs. For those with much older cards, a used 980 Ti or 1070, or various AMD cards, are good options.
Ian.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
Yes, exactly. A very appropriate quote.Skiddywinks - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
No reason Ford couldn't have done both though. There is no technological reason nVidia could not have released a GTX 2080 Ti as well. But they know they couldn't charge as much, and the vast majority of people would not buy the RTX version. Instead, it makes their 1080 Ti stock look much more appealing to for value oriented gamers, helping them shift that stock as well as charge a huge price for the new cards.It's really great business, but as a gamer and not a stockholder, I'm salty.
Spunjji - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Ford didn't invent the car, though. Ford invented a way to make them cheaper.Ford's strategy was not to make a new car that might do something different one day and then charge through the effing nose for it.
Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
That quote applies perfectly to our digital electronic World: we want to go faster from point A to point B. To do that, Henry Ford gave us a car (a faster "horse"). We want the same from GPUs and CPU's, to be faster. Prettier sure, pink even. But first just make it fast.Writer's Block - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link
Except there is no evidence he said that - it is a great statement though, and conveys the intended message wellHxx - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
overall dissapointing performance. RTX 2080 is a flat out bad buy at $800+ when 1080 ti custom boards are as low as $600. the RTX 2080 TI is a straight up ripoff when consumers can easily surpass its performance with 2 x 1080 TIs. I agree on the conclusion though that you are buying hardware that you wont take adavantage of yet but still, if Nvidia wants to push this hardware to all gamers, they need to drop the pricing in line with their performance otherwise not many will buy into the hype.