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
beisat - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Very nice review, by far the best one I've read. Thanks for that.How likely do you think the launch of another generation is in 2019 from Nvidia / and or something competitive from AMD based on 7nm?
I currently have gtx970, skipped the Pascal generation and was waiting for Turing. But I don't like being an early adopter and feel that for pure rasterisation, these cards aren't worth it. Yes they are more powerful then the 10er series I skipped, but they also costs more - so performance pro $$$ is similar, and I'm not willing to pay the same amout of $$$ for the same performance as I would have 2 years ago.
Guess I'll just have to stick it out with my 970 at 1080p?
dguy6789 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 are highly disappointing.V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
That’s a rather debatable take that most hardware sites and tech-journalists would disagree with.But would do they know, amirite?
dguy6789 - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Just about every review of these cards states that right now they're disappointing and we need to wait and see how ray tracing games pan out to see if that will change.We waited this many years to have the smallest generation to generation performance jump we have ever seen. Price went way up too. The cards are hotter and use a more power which makes me question how long they last before they die.
The weird niche Nvidia "features" these cards have will end up like PhysX.
The performance you get for what you pay for a 2080 or 2080 Ti is simply terrible.
dguy6789 - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Not to mention that Nvidia's stock was just downgraded due to the performance of the 2080 and 2080 Ti.mapesdhs - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
V900, you've posted a lot stuff here that was itself debatable, but that comment was just nonsense. I don't believe for a moment you think most tech sites think these cards are a worthy buy. The vast majority of reviews have been generally or heavily negative. I therefore conclude troll.hammer256 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Oof, still on the 12nm process. Which frankly is quite remarkable how much rasterization performance they were able to squeeze out, while putting in the tensor and ray tracing cores. The huge dies are not surprising in that regard. In the end, architectural efficiency can only go so far, and the fundamental limit is still on transistor budget.With that said, I'm guessing there's going to be a 7nm refresh pretty soon-ish? I would wait...
V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
You might have to wait a long time then.Don’t see a 7nm refresh on the horizon. Maybe in a year, probably not until 2020.
*There isn’t any HP/high density 7nm process available right now. (The only 7nm product shipping right now is the A12. And that’s a low power/mobile process. The 7nm HP processes are all in various form of pre-production/research.
*Price. 7nm processes are going to be expensive. And the Turing dies are gigantic, and already expensive to make on its current node. That means that Nvidia will most likely wait with a 7nm Turing until proces have come down, and the process is more mature.
*And then there’s the lack of competition: AMD doesn’t have anything even close to the 2080 right now, and won’t for a good 3 years if Navi is a mid-range GPU. As long as the 2080Ti is the king of performance, there’s no reason for Nvidia to rush to a smaller process.
Zoolook - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link
Kirin 980 has been shipping for a while, should be in stores in two weeks, we know that atleast Vega was sampling in June, so it depends on the allocation at TSMC it's not 100% Apple.Antoine. - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
The assumption under which this article operates that RTX2080 should be compared to GTX1080 and RTX2080TI to GTX1080TI is a disgrace. It allows you to be overly satisfied with performance evolutions between GPUS with a vastly different price tag! It just shows that you completely bought the BS renaming of Titan into Ti's. Of course the next gen Titan is going to perform better than the previous generation's Ti ! Such a gullible take on these new products cannot be by sheer stupidity alone.