The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Review: Memories of the Future
by Ryan Smith on July 23, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
Power, Temperatures, & Noise
Last, but not least of course, is our look at power, temperatures, and noise levels. While a high performing card is good in its own right, an excellent card can deliver great performance while also keeping power consumption and the resulting noise levels in check.
GeForce Video Card Voltages | |||||
RTX 2080S Boost | RTX 2080S Idle | RTX 2080 Boost | RTX 2070S Boost | ||
1.05v | 0.65v | 1.05v | 1.043v |
Overall, the voltages being used for the RTX 2080 Super are not any different than NVIDIA’s other TU104 cards – or any of their other Turing cards, for that matter. At its highest clockspeeds the card runs at 1.05v, quickly stepping down to below 1v at lower clockspeeds. The 0.65v idle voltage is among the lowest we’ve ever recorded for an NVIDIA card, however.
GeForce Video Card Average Clockspeeds | |||||
Game | RTX 2080S | RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 2080 | RTX 2070S | |
Max Boost Clock | 1965MHz | 1950MHz | 1900MHz | 1950MHz | |
Boost Clock | 1815MHz | 1545MHz | 1710MHz | 1770MHz | |
Tomb Raider | 1937MHz | 1725MHz | 1785MHz | 1875MHz | |
F1 2019 | 1920MHz | 1725MHz | 1785MHz | 1875MHz | |
Assassin's Creed | 1920MHz | 1800MHz | 1815MHz | 1890MHz | |
Metro Exodus | 1937MHz | 1755MHz | 1785MHz | 1875MHz | |
Strange Brigade | 1920MHz | 1695MHz | 1770MHz | 1875MHz | |
Total War: TK | 1937MHz | 1740MHz | 1785MHz | 1875MHz | |
The Division 2 | 1937MHz | 1635MHz | 1740MHz | 1845MHz | |
Grand Theft Auto V | 1937MHz | 1815MHz | 1815MHz | 1890MHz | |
Forza Horizon 4 | 1937MHz | 1815MHz | 1800MHz | 1890MHz |
Looking at clockspeeds, we can piece together a couple of interesting pieces of information. On the clockspeed side, NVIDIA hasn’t actually changed the card’s maximum clockspeed all that much. Our RTX topped out at 1900MHz, and the RTX 2080 Super is only a bit higher at 1965MHz. That they’re doing it without more voltage is a bit more interesting – it looks like chip quality may have improved a bit over the past year – but not too surprising.
What is more surprising however are the average clockspeeds we recorded for the RTX 2080 Super. In short, the card spends a lot of time at or near its top turbo bins. With temperature compensation active, our RTX 2080 Super tops out at 1937MHz; a clockspeed that it holds at for over half of our games even at 4K. Quite frankly the RTX 2080 Super is almost a boring card in this respect (in a good way); there’s just not much in the way of power throttling going on here. If anything, the hard part is getting the card above 90-95% power usage.
This, ultimately, is why the RTX 2080 Super is as fast as it is versus the vanilla RTX 2080. The extra SMs help, but it’s the extra 100-150MHz on the GPU clockspeed that’s really driving the card.
Getting to power consumption itself then, idle is effectively unchanged, exactly as we’d expect it. Load power, on the other hand, is paying the price for those 1900MHz+ clockspeeds. Under both FurMark and Tomb Raider, our RTX 2080 Super-equipped system is drawing almost the same amount of power as the RTX 2080 Ti system with a difference of just a few watts. That performance doesn’t come for free. NVIDIA’s overall power efficiency is still quite good here (the Radeon VII won’t be touching it, for example), but it’s clearly regressed a bit versus the RTX 2080 Ti and vanilla RTX 2080.
It is worth noting, however, that often the card was clockspeed-limited rather than power limited. So while Tomb Raider was specifically picked to be a punishing game – a task it delivered on here – I fully expect that the RTX 2080 Super is drawing a bit less than the RTX 2080 Ti in around half of our other games.
With higher power consumption and the same cooler comes higher temperatures. Even FurMark’s 77C is still several degrees below the card’s 84C thermal throttle point, but it is a very straightforward consequence of the increased power consumption.
Last, but not least, we have noise. Again this is the same cooler as the RTX 2080 & RTX 2080 Ti, so the card has to work a bit harder to keep itself cool versus the original RTX 2080. The net result is that the RTX 2080 Super splits the difference between the original RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti, peaking at 46.5 dB(A). This is unlikely to be a very noticeable change as compared to the RTX 2080, but it’s louder none the less. I’m actually a bit surprised it didn’t pull even with the RTX 2080 Ti, but then our RTX 2080 Ti seems to run just a bit loud period – even at idle it’s a bit louder.
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designgears - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Oooh right, forgot about that.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
minor speed bump I consider anything 50Mhz range, not in the hundreds quicker IMHOI personally feel like Nv still up to their dirty old deceitful tricks/ways and making excuses as to the why. if they were able to release as "super" this quickly for the price reduction "sort of speak" that says they very much should have done this right off the bat instead of making a song and dance about it, effectively screwing early adopters of their products (YET AGAIN) just to slap a faster version (slight less+cost so basically the same price for even faster)
A price reduction after release, I understand, a price reduction and a faster Overclocked version 3-7mth down the line to "freshen up" absolutely, but, a bait and switch (like the "new" nintendo switch same context, shafting of early adopters, which happens all the time, but in tech world Nv/Apple/Intel were/are notorious terrible at this.
All that being said, I wonder how fast a 2080 any version esp the Ti be WITHOUT the ray trace crap being shoved into it, i.e do "standard DX features/subfeatures that do not require proprietary hard/software"
I would imagine the transistor budget they used for the RT cores were likely more as a direct result of them cleaning and chopping as they had since the GTX 500 generation (basically) to get the speed up and power use down.
By them gutting and re-arrange the transistors etc they were left with a bunch they could NOT use for much of anything else (or power would go up and speed would go down type thing) so they settled on things like Gsync, all the various Nvidia "game" features (shadow play, Raytrace etc etc)
anyways. would be cool if they did in fact offer 2 versions for each of these, 1 with and 1 without ray tracing, likely the non RT would be quite a bit faster and similar reduction in the power from not having to power extra "junk in the trunk"
in this, AMD would do very well to not worry about all that extra crud just because someone else is, focus on speed and power everything else is "old news"
features such as Raytracing the way they do it is a self defeating sales pitch, basically "here is a cup of water, in 1 second you lose X of that water and owe me Z more for the remaining amount, better hurry up as the next cup of water is changing it's internal design a wee bit to deliver the water in fancier ways so it will appear to be better water but in fact is less of the water you actually want as they had to make room for and price in the fancy cup design which has only ONE purpose compared to the cup itself which could just be made bigger with a smaller exit to ensure water is there forever"
Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I will tell you a story about rereleasing and effectively screwing early adopters of products.. aka AMD REBRANDEON wit their Rx200 and 300 series and then another rebrand AMD REBRANDEON RX 480, RX580 and the final nail in the coffin AMD REBRANDEON RX 590.Xyler94 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Nvidia did this too. GTX 1060 6GB, 3GB, GTX 10603GB, but with less cuda cores, GT1030 DDR4, GT1030 GDDR5 (Which both had the same model number, GT1030).Even the Super's are rebranded...
Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Supers are not rebranded, different chips. But nice try. 5/7Xyler94 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
What are you smoking? They aren't different at all. Slight tweaks in the number of CUDA and RT Cores sure, but that's about it. Evidence that overclocking the 2080 gets you on par in the 2080 Super. It's literally the same architecture, minus a few CUDA cores more. Please show me technical details as to how these chips are different, or do you also believe Intel's 9th gen is vastly different than 8th gen?rocky12345 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
LMAFAO dude they are the same exact chips as the launch cards. The only difference is Nvidia has not fused off as many cuda cores this time around and in the 2080 Super's case you are finally getting the 2080 that should have been launched on release day with the full core enabled. The biggest change here is finally offering the 2060S with 8GB memory because 6GB on the older 1060 and 2060 is going to become a problem at some point.tamalero - Wednesday, July 24, 2019 - link
You sir , are an idiot. they are the same identical chips. Only difference is that they have less cut down areas (which is no surprising if they improved yields).Korguz - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
Xyler94/rocky12345/tamalero dont waste you time with maxiking, his hatred and bias against AMD will blind him to any thing but what he sees/types. as you can see a few messages down when he " claims " amd's video card business constantly loses money, but in actuality, its kept them alive long enough while their cpu side, wasnt doing so was as the 2 people who replied, posted.rocky12345 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I had the R9 390x and yes it was based on the 290x but for the price I paid and the performance it gave me up until a month ago because I upgraded it was a decent product.So basically Nvidia just did a rebrand as well with the Super cards. Pretty much the same cards with more of the chip enabled this time around. Some could argue these Super cards are what Nvidia should have released 1 year ago and not the cut down cards they actually released with a small performance bump over the 10 series or at least not the performance bump everyone was expecting. If Nvidia would have released these Super cards at launch the only thing people would have complained about was the price gouge & even then to a lesser degree because the performance would have been a bit higher than the launch cards back then.