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 | |||
99th Percentile |
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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Hixbot - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
I'm not sure how midrange 2070/2060 cards will sell if they're not a significant value in performance/price compared to 1070/1060 cards. If AMD offer no competition, Nvidia should still compete with itselfWwhat - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link
It's interesting that every comment I've seen says a similar thing and that nobody thinks of uses outside of gaming.I would think that for real raytracers and Adobe's graphics and video software for instance the tensor and RT cores would be very interesting.
I wonder though if open source software will be able to successfully use that new hardware or that Nvidia is too closed for it to get the advantages you might expect.
And apart from raytracers and such there is also the software science students use too.
And with the interest in AI currently by students and developers it might also be an interesting offering.
Although that again relies on Nvidia playing ball a bit.
michaelrw - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
"where paying 43% or 50% more gets you 27-28% more performance"1080 Ti can be bought in the $600 range, wheres the 2080 Ti is $1200 .. so I'd say thats more than 43-50% price increase..at a minimum we're talking a 71% increase, at worst 100% (Launch MSRP for 1080 Ti was $699)
V900 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
Which is the wrong way of looking at it.NVIDIA didn’t just increase the price for shit and giggles, the Turing GPUs are much more expensive to fab, since you’re talking about almost 20 BILLION transistors squeezed into a few hundred mm2.
Regardless: Comparing the 2080 with the 1080, and claiming there is a 70% price increase, is a bogus logic in the first place, since the 2080 brings a number of things to the table that the 1080 isn’t even capable of.
Find me a 1080ti with DLSS and that is also capable of raytracing, and then we can compare prices and figure out if there’s a price increase or not.
imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
In brings it to the table..on paper more like it. You literally listed the two things that are not really shown AT ALL.mscsniperx - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
No, actually YOUR logic is bogus. Find me a DLSS or Raytracing game to bench.. You can't. There is a reason for that. Raytracing will require a Massive FPS hit, Nvidia knows this and is delaying you from seeing that as damage control.Yojimbo - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
There are no ray tracing games because the technology is new, not because NVIDIA is "delaying them". As far as DLSS, I think those games will appear faster than ray tracing.Andrew LB - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Coming soon:Darksiders III from Gunfire Games / THQ Nordic
Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna from KeokeN Interactive
Fear The Wolves from Vostok Games / Focus Home Interactive
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from Ninja Theory
KINETIK from Hero Machine Studios
Outpost Zero from Symmetric Games / tinyBuild Games
Overkill's The Walking Dead from Overkill Software / Starbreeze Studios
SCUM from Gamepires / Devolver Digital
Stormdivers from Housemarque
Ark: Survival Evolved from Studio Wildcard
Atomic Heart from Mundfish
Dauntless from Phoenix Labs
Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition from Square Enix
Fractured Lands from Unbroken Studios
Hitman 2 from IO Interactive / Warner Bros.
Islands of Nyne from Define Human Studios
Justice from NetEase
JX3 from Kingsoft
Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds from PUBG Corp.
Remnant: From The Ashes from Arc Games
Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass from Croteam / Devolver Digital
Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix / Eidos-Montréal / Crystal Dynamics / Nixxes
The Forge Arena from Freezing Raccoon Studios
We Happy Few from Compulsion Games / Gearbox
Funny how the same people who praised AMD for being the first to bring full DX12 support yet only 15 games in the first two years used it, are the same people sh*tting on nVidia for bringing a far more revolutionary technology that's going to be in far more games in a shorter time span.
jordanclock - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Considering AMD was the first to bring support to an API that all GPUs could have support for, DLSS is not a comparison. DLSS is an Nvidia-only feature and Nvidia couldn't manage to have even ONE game on launch day with DLSS.Manch - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
AMD spawned Mantle which then turned into Vulcan. Also pushed MS to dev DX12 as it was in both their interests. These APIs can be used by all.DLSS while potentially very cool, is as Jordan said proprietary. Like hair works and other crap ot will get light support but devs when it comes to feature sets will spend most of their effort building to common ground. With consoles being AMD GPU based, guess where that will be.
If will be interesting how AMD will ultimatley respond. Ie gsync/freesync CUDA/OpenCL, etc.
As Nvidia has stated, these features are designed to work with how current game engines already function so they dont (the devs) have to reinvent the wheel. Ultimately this meanz the integration wont be very deep at least not for awhile.
For consumers the end goal is always better graphics at the same price point when new releases happen.
Not that these are bad cards, just expensove and two very key features are unavailable, and that sucks. Hopefully the situation will change sooner rather than later.