Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Faster, More Expensive Than GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

[sr13798]

Canceled my order at Best Buy, RTX 2080. Nice not having to deal with shipping it back, it was going to be a store pickup. Got the upgrade itch, but not doing it on these reviews. My 1080 ti beats most of the benchmarks I have seen. Oh well.

 

[sr13798]

Oh, and I am not buying a 1200 graphics card. Sorry Nvidia.

 

[alextheblue]

What? No “just buy it” in your conclusion.

As I predicted, it was a fair and honest review. I understand all the anger at that particular opinion piece, but the hardware reviews have yet to disappoint me. Thank you, Chris.

 

[nobspls]

The RTX 2080 should be $500 just like GTX1080 was. But since there is no AMD competition.... guess what. nVidia can price it against their own GTX 1080ti, since RTX2080 performs basically at GTX1080ti, so they are priced the same, which allows them to overprice the RTX2080ti to nonsensical range. This what happens when there is no competition, us gamers gets screwed.

So the question is who is going to patient enough to wait this out? If you been running GTX1060 for the past 2 years, would you cough up the moola to jump up to this level of performance? Or would it just be irrelevant to you?

 

[wifiburger]

So how many gigarays does it have ?

 

[ah]

Only the RTX2080ti can be said to be truly capable, either u can play 4K at ultra or u can't.

 

[motocros1]

i'm wondering if the heat/power throttling becomes a problem when the RT cores are actually being used as opposed to being idle in the current test environment

 

[motocros1]

or RT core and Tensor cores to be more accurate

 

[bit_user]

Battlefield 1 (DX12) @ 2560x1440: RTX 2080's avg fps is 114.8

That's higher than the RTX 2080 Ti's and uncharacteristic of the other results for this card or this test. Furthermore, its result at 4k is more reasonable. Can you recheck or retest the 2.5k result?

Doom 3 (Vulkan) @ 4k: GTX 1080 Ti's avg fps is 63.0

This seems suspiciously low - almost equal to what the GTX 1080 did. Can you recheck or retest the 4k result for this card?

Also, the GTX 1080 vs RTX 2080 result on Rise of Tomb Raider (4k) is surprising. 67% improvement, whereas the 2.5k result for those cards was only 38%, and the Ti's only improved 21% at 4k.

Lastly, the Ti cards' improvement on Witcher 3 @ 2.5k is only 5.4%, yet the improvement at 4k is a whopping 79.2%! What's going on, here?

Thanks.

 

[bit_user]

My analysis:

Improvement from GTX 1080 to RTX 2080:

Spec              Improvement
------------------------------
Compute (TFLOPS):   8.5%
Memory (GB/sec):   39.9%

Category        99th %ile  Mean FPS
------------------------------------
DX11 (median):     30.7%    33.7%
DX12 (median):     31.8%    33.5%
2.5k (median):     28.7%    31.1%
4k (median):       31.2%    36.6%
Overall (median):  30.7%    33.7%

The biggest area of improvement is DX12 @ 2.5k: 39.8% / 31.1%

As you can see, these results are well within the range predicted by the compute and memory bandwidth increases. However, most are at the upper end of this range, suggesting either a bandwidth bottleneck or that architectural improvements amplified the compute gains.


Here's a link to my GTX 1080 Ti to RTX 2080 Ti analysis.

Edit: Added Mean FPS numbers.

 

[bit_user]

My analysis:

Improvement from GTX 1080 Ti to RTX 2080:

Spec              Improvement
------------------------------
Compute (TFLOPS):  -15.9%
Memory (GB/sec):    -7.5%

Category        99th %ile  Mean FPS
------------------------------------
DX11 (median):      3.5%     4.8%
DX12 (median):      3.0%     3.1%
2.5k (median):      2.5%     3.4%
4k (median):        5.3%     4.8%
Overall (median):   3.5%     4.3%

The biggest area of improvement is DX11 @ 4k: 5.7% / 6.5%

It's a little surprising we see such improvements, in spite of less raw compute horsepower and memory bandwidth. This lends more credence to the idea that architectural improvements in the CUDA cores have delivered tangible gains.


Here's a link to my GTX 1080 Ti to RTX 2080 Ti analysis. See above for my GTX 1080 to RTX 2080 analysis.

Edit: Added Mean FPS numbers.

 

[bit_user]

Note that I used median to best reject the outliers (several results seem suspicious) and provide a good expectation of the typical gains one can expect.

 

[Bandock]

I think it would be more accurate to say that these cards are in general souped up for DX12/Vulkan as a side-effect for real-time raytracing support.

In fact, I actually called it by mentioning to a few people or other places that those cards likely have superior async compute a few weeks to possibly a month earlier (even compared to AMD's cards). Turns out that was the case after looking at a review and set of benchmarks from PC Gamer (from Jarred Walton) and Hardware Unboxed (from Steve Walton). Really confirmed for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (which like DOOM (2016), is known to have really good Vulkan performance and has support for async compute).

As for the pricing, they definitely are overpriced compared to their Pascal predecessors. If anything, the ones who could justify such a purchase are those who own games that work well to begin with or are focusing on a DX12/Vulkan future. For DX11/OpenGL, it's definitely better just to stick with Pascal if we take price into consideration.

 

[Jim90]

Nice honest review.

As soon as games start adding raytraced effects, it might might be lucky to maintain 60fps at 1080p. : P It would certainly be a compromise having to disable major visual effects just to get anywhere close to pushing 4K resolution on a $1200 card. It's certainly possible that developers will greatly tone down the quality of the effects to get them running better though, but that means these technology demonstrations of RTX that Nvidia has been showing off might not actually be all that representative of how the effects will look when they appear in actual games. I know Battlefield V's developer was already talking about having to scale back the raytracing effects from what was shown at Nvidia's conference. Either way, I don't expect the 2080 Ti to be running next year's games at max graphics settings with stable frame rates at 4K.

This ^^
Real time RT at an acceptable frame rate and at current consumer resolutions (i.e. no restriction to 1080p) is and has always been a core goal for all - developers and users. I admire Nvidia for taking the first steps but the results currently leave a lot to be desired and the asking price is insane. Too many developer and user compromises. I will buy into the effect, but not now.

 

[kinggremlin]

The RTX 2080 should be $500 just like GTX1080 was. But since there is no AMD competition.... guess what. nVidia can price it against their own GTX 1080ti, since RTX2080 performs basically at GTX1080ti, so they are priced the same, which allows them to overprice the RTX2080ti to nonsensical range. This what happens when there is no competition, us gamers gets screwed.

Why does this false information keep getting posted at so many sites? GTX 1080 was $600 at launch, while the FE editions were $700. 2080FE at $800 is only $100 more than the 1080 was at launch. The MSRP for the 1080 did not drop to $500 until 9 months after launch, just before the 1080ti was released.

 

[radiatedkilla]

In my country asus rtx2080 costs 1100 euro. Wtf lol. Just get out of my face ngreedia

 

[sr13798]

So I realized that Best Buy has 10% off if your birthday is within 30 days, so I grabbed a 2080 for $719 usd. Why not. I am still adding to my mining rig hobby anyway.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

One of the things I picked up on from the forums, iirc, was that NVidia got the bright idea they could charge this much because of... every. single. person. who decided to buy in the middle of the crypto-mining craze when prices were insanely sky-high, was willing to shell out the extra $$$. Now they feel the market will bear these exuberant prices just because of the ones that bought at the crazy prices.

 

[Rodrigodrt]

I'm not sure if RT and Tensor cores justify the uncanny price, but people need to relax a bit... what they exected? sheer performace, a 100% increase maybe? sure if RT wasn't introduced at all, ofc its on an early stage and only time will, but i figure that such tech has a cost, and bringing something new to the shelf is always risky... people are looking at RTX like if they were a major failure already

 

[JamesSneed]

This is about what I had for expectations for this series. At an academic level I appreciate the ray tracing capability but the reality is its going to be some time before ray tracing is common. The price increase has me waiting for the 7nm shrink which should also let me see what AMD's Navi is all about as well.

 

[newsonline5000000]

Note that I used median to best reject the outliers (several results seem suspicious) and provide a good expectation of the typical gains one can expect.

The Pricing is the problem here . RTX 2080 Should replace the GTX 1080 pricewise.

and the 2080 Ti , the 1080 Ti

remember when the 1070 outperformed the 980 ti ? at a CHEAPER PRICE

 

[littleleo]

Nice review, not sure how much it is tilted in Nvidia's favor since Tom's is kissing Nvidia's A$$ to get cards for testing. I don't feel I can trust Tom's as much any more especially since the "Just Buy it" marketing piece done for Nvidia. I'll wait for sites that didn't post results on the 19th/20th since only the Nvidia "Approved sites" would be given stock for testing early. Since they didn't have stock handed to them from Nvidia I think they have a chance to be more objective.

My gut feeling is these cards are way way over priced and Nvidia has gotten very full of themselves, and have gotten way too greedy. I don't think I need a video card that cost over $1K to play a game. I'm an old time gamer but I have been very underwhelmed with the 2008s launch so far. Lets hope some good news is coming soon on the GPU front.

Looks like the 2080 is the new 1080 Ti, and so on so the improvements per price tier aren't as exciting. So is there any current game that needs these cards?

 

[cangelini]

Battlefield 1 (DX12) @ 2560x1440: RTX 2080's avg fps is 114.8

That's higher than the RTX 2080 Ti's and uncharacteristic of the other results for this card or this test. Furthermore, its result at 4k is more reasonable. Can you recheck or retest the 2.5k result?

Doom 3 (Vulkan) @ 4k: GTX 1080 Ti's avg fps is 63.0

This seems suspiciously low - almost equal to what the GTX 1080 did. Can you recheck or retest the 4k result for this card?

Also, the GTX 1080 vs RTX 2080 result on Rise of Tomb Raider (4k) is surprising. 67% improvement, whereas the 2.5k result for those cards was only 38%, and the Ti's only improved 21% at 4k.

Lastly, the Ti cards' improvement on Witcher 3 @ 2.5k is only 5.4%, yet the improvement at 4k is a whopping 79.2%! What's going on, here?

Thanks.

Hey bit,

Now that I've had a night to sleep, I'll take a look at these when I get home from the metrology lab. Any results that looked suspect were retested as charts were compiled, but it's entirely possible something was missed (though none of that would have affected the conclusions--I think we have enough data for a fair consensus). I do appreciate you bringing those to my attention!

Chris

 

[cangelini]

Nice review, not sure how much it is tilted in Nvidia's favor since Tom's is kissing Nvidia's A$$ to get cards for testing. I don't feel I can trust Tom's as much any more especially since the "Just Buy it" marketing piece done for Nvidia. I'll wait for sites that didn't post results on the 19th/20th since only the Nvidia "Approved sites" would be given stock for testing early. Since they didn't have stock handed to them from Nvidia I think they have a chance to be more objective.

My gut feeling is these cards are way way over priced and Nvidia has gotten very full of themselves, and have gotten way too greedy. I don't think I need a video card that cost over $1K to play a game. I'm an old time gamer but I have been very underwhelmed with the 2008s launch so far. Lets hope some good news is coming soon on the GPU front.

Looks like the 2080 is the new 1080 Ti, and so on so the improvements per price tier aren't as exciting. So is there any current game that needs these cards?

I can assure you that this review was handled in the same manner as all other graphics reviews for the past 10 years--including 20 hour work days to get everything finished in time

 

[bit_user]

Note that I used median to best reject the outliers (several results seem suspicious) and provide a good expectation of the typical gains one can expect.

The Pricing is the problem here . RTX 2080 Should replace the GTX 1080 pricewise.

and the 2080 Ti , the 1080 Ti

remember when the 1070 outperformed the 980 ti ? at a CHEAPER PRICE

I didn't say anything about pricing. I just wanted to analyze the data. I wanted to see how the the GTX 1080 Ti compared with the RTX 2080, using the same methodology as my other comparisons, just to know how equivalent they really are.

People can make value judgements for themselves, but I will not be buying at these prices. I got a good deal on my 900-series card after Pascal launched. I might do the same thing with Turing, and hold off buying until the next gen launches. Or maybe prices will dip when AMD launches Navi.