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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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.