Review Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Review: Leaving Navi In The Dust

[TJ Hooker]

Again not sure why you think 17 percent. Maybe you just play Wolfenstein or something lol.

That comes straight from the article: "The $699 GeForce RTX 2080 Super [...] serving up average frame rates that are 6% higher than GeForce RTX 2080 (and 17% better than GTX 1080 Ti)". The 1080 Ti in question is the FE.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I paid $700, not sure that you overpaying $759 is relevant. The 2080 Super is 6 percent faster than my 1080 ti over 30 games or so. Again not sure why you think 17 percent. Maybe you just play Wolfenstein or something lol. We have incessant whining about prices because we have the same card for 3 years. 1080 ti, 2080, now 2080 Super. Pathetic. And we should be comparing the 2080 custom models to the 2080 super founder's pricing, since the 2080 founder's pricing was just price gouging for early adopters, and not the MSRP. We can whine about nVidia's transparent manipulation of MSRP. The fact that this review actually had the gall to compare perf/dollar by comparing $800 (for the $700 card) vs $700 is unbelievable.

Any review worth its salt would point these things out. Instead I see 9/10 and 8/10 everywhere for the same perf/dollar for the last 3 years. Apparently we don't even have anything but paid product promotions anymore. It's disgusting.

Say what you want but a proper comparison is a proper comparison. The new FE is cheaper than the old FE and the AiBs have not yet been announced their price points, I am going to make the guess that they will be more than the FE and current 2080 AiB boards.

We have not had the same card for three years. A 1080Ti is nothing like the 2080, even if you don't count the Tesnor cores. It has almost 20% less SPUs than the 1080Ti, 3GB less memory, a smaller memory bus and slightly less memory bandwidth yet was beating the 1080Ti at 4K.

 

[AlistairAB]

That comes straight from the article: "The $699 GeForce RTX 2080 Super [...] serving up average frame rates that are 6% higher than GeForce RTX 2080 (and 17% better than GTX 1080 Ti)". The 1080 Ti in question is the FE.

That's very deceptive since the 1080 ti FE was trash and no one bought it, and custom models were available from the beginning. My 1080 ti axial fan model performed EXACTLY the same as the 2080 on average.

"A 1080Ti is nothing like the 2080" ... lol... you should be embarrassed to say that. You know we're talking about perf and cost and power not architectural changes which are irrelevant to users.

I don't know where all this need to defend nVidia is coming from. My 1080 ti was cheaper than a 2080 at launch, and performed exactly the same. Then the custom 2080s were released at the actual real MSRP and it was the same performance for the same money. Now it is 5-6 percent behind a Super for the same money. That's the same card in perf/dollar for 3 years. Except I got 3GB more VRAM. Stop sugar coating the disaster that has been the 2080. Completely terrible. If you can't even give the 2080 or 2080 Super a bad review, then which card deserves it?

 

[jimmysmitty]

I don't know where all this need to defend nVidia is coming from. My 1080 ti was cheaper than a 2080 at launch, and performed exactly the same. Then the custom 2080s were released at the actual real MSRP and it was the same performance for the same money. Now it is 5-6 percent behind a Super for the same money. That's the same card in perf/dollar for 3 years. Except I got 3GB more VRAM. Stop sugar coating the disaster that has been the 2080. Completely terrible. If you can't even give the 2080 or 2080 Super a bad review, then which card deserves it?

The problem is you want a bad review based on price alone which is, again, NOT the only measure to review a GPU. The 2080 Super is a good GPU at a meh price.

The last GPU I can remember that really deserved a bad review was the R9 290 series. Those were just bad cards. Oh and you want the same card? The R9 280 wasjust a HD7970GHz rebranded. You could pretty much flash a HD7970GHz with a 280 BIOS and run with it.

 

[AlistairAB]

The problem is you want a bad review based on price alone

You know that is not what I'm saying. The RT features are not useful, anyone who owns an RT card knows that. DLSS was a scam: standard resolution scaling is more performant for image quality. And overall performance is the same for 3 model years. Don't scam people and pretend the 1080 ti is worse than it actually is. And we got less VRAM too. I'm just wondering if Tom's would ever give a card a bad review. Apparently not, so why bother coming to read reviews. What could be worse than the 2080 Super?

"The last GPU I can remember that really deserved a bad review was the R9 290 series. Those were just bad cards. "

Apparently you confuse a card review with a cooler review if you think the 290x was worse. At least it was a huge step up from the 7970. 50 percent faster according to TechPowerUp. Not 5%.

 

[jimmysmitty]

You know that is not what I'm saying. The RT features are not useful, anyone who owns an RT card knows that. DLSS was a scam: standard resolution scaling is more performant for image quality. And overall performance is the same for 3 model years. Don't scam people and pretend the 1080 ti is worse than it actually is. And we got less VRAM too. I'm just wondering if Tom's would ever give a card a bad review. Apparently not, so why bother coming to read reviews. What could be worse than the 2080 Super?

"The last GPU I can remember that really deserved a bad review was the R9 290 series. Those were just bad cards. "

Apparently you confuse a card review with a cooler review if you think the 290x was worse. At least it was a huge step up from the 7970. 50 percent faster according to TechPowerUp. Not 5%.

Oh so Tesselation was also not useful? AMD pushed Tesselation harder than nVidia is pushing RT. As I have said with any new tech it takes time to adopt and eventually it will be adopted especially if we can get hardware that can push it. AMDs GPUs had hardware based Tesselation while nVidia did not for a few cards after. Now its in every single game.

DLSS is an interesting idea and like anything might improve with time. Just dismissing a technology because its new is against everything tech enthusiasts are for.

What could be worse is no real competition. AMD isn't pushing them and hasn't for quite a while. Same thing happened with Intel. Without proper competition nothing major changes. Well that or when walls get hit like with CPUs right now.

And no the 290 was not 50% faster than the 7970GHz. I had a HD7970GHz and was awaiting Hawaii. It launched and was not impressive. Now much better coolers and driver improvements plus the extra GB of RAM may make it seem that much better, combined with AMD not optimizing for the 7970 as long as the 290, but it was a bad launch for a much anticipated GPU.

I guess I will give it that it had bad pricing due to the exploding crypto currency market as well. Not really its fault but that did not help at all.

 

[AlistairAB]

Oh so Tesselation was also not useful? AMD pushed Tesselation harder than nVidia is pushing RT. As I have said with any new tech it takes time to adopt and eventually it will be adopted especially if we can get hardware that can push it. AMDs GPUs had hardware based Tesselation while nVidia did not for a few cards after. Now its in every single game.

DLSS is an interesting idea and like anything might improve with time. Just dismissing a technology because its new is against everything tech enthusiasts are for.

What could be worse is no real competition. AMD isn't pushing them and hasn't for quite a while. Same thing happened with Intel. Without proper competition nothing major changes. Well that or when walls get hit like with CPUs right now.

And no the 290 was not 50% faster than the 7970GHz. I had a HD7970GHz and was awaiting Hawaii. It launched and was not impressive. Now much better coolers and driver improvements plus the extra GB of RAM may make it seem that much better, combined with AMD not optimizing for the 7970 as long as the 290, but it was a bad launch for a much anticipated GPU.

I guess I will give it that it had bad pricing due to the exploding crypto currency market as well. Not really its fault but that did not help at all.

I didn't dismiss RT in general for the future, I dismissed the performance of RT in the current products. DLSS is useless, you get better image quality with a lower resolution upscale. That was obvious the day nVidia announced it and refused to provide any side by side image comparisons at the same framerate. You're just sidestepping the fact that my Aorus 1080 Ti beat the launch 2080 in perf/dollar. TechPowerUp says the 290x is 50 percent faster as I said, you can argue with them. I'm done.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

Price to performance is the most important metric.

Edit: even if a GPU is objectively a good one.

 

[TEAMSWITCHER]

It scored higher than the 5700XT...? Toms... these reviews are useless if they don't make sense... you know?!!!

There is no way this product can be recommended... NO WAY in hell.

Score should be 2.5/5

The 5700XT is not really a good purchase. RT enabled games are already here (I played three of them this week alone) and more are coming every month. It makes little sense to buy a mid-range card right now (without RT features) only to have to buy another mid-tier card next year when AMD finally ships RT parts. Tying up $400 into a graphics card that will be obsolete in 6 months isn't a good idea, not when there are competitive cards that deliver RT features today for only $100 more. The 2070 super is a much better value.

 

[Gurg]

What could be worse than the 2080 Super?

Every AMD GPU ever produced and every Nvidia GPU except for the 2080ti and Titan RTX.

Price to performance is the most important metric.

Edit: even if a GPU is objectively a good one.

No! People want personally affordable GPUs that will suit their needs to perform well enough to run their chosen monitors. The 1080ti was the first single non-sli GPU solution capable of adequately running a 4k monitor.

What an individual can afford or fiscally justify is their personal decision and does not impact the performance of the product. Tech product performance evaluation is what attracts me to sites like TH.

 

[cangelini]

The reviewer (Chris Angelini) probably isn't the one that chose the title.

Thank you for the sentiment TJ. To be fair to the rest of the TH team, the first title was my doing. I was trying to stay relevant to what I've been working on for the past few weeks and knew the refreshed 2080 Super @ 6% faster than 2080 FE wouldn't be much of an attention-getter on its own. Past the title, Navi wasn't a focus in the story at all, aside from providing comparison data in the chart, so I was fine with the change. Lesson learned--if there's not much there to get the audience excited, don't lean on the title for a shot of adrenaline. The effort to improve is ongoing, and the feedback from everyone is appreciated.
Chris

 

[-Fran-]

Thank you for the sentiment TJ. To be fair to the rest of the TH team, the first title was my doing. I was trying to stay relevant to what I've been working on for the past few weeks and knew the refreshed 2080 Super @ 6% faster than 2080 FE wouldn't be much of an attention-getter on its own. Past the title, Navi wasn't a focus in the story at all, aside from providing comparison data in the chart, so I was fine with the change. Lesson learned--if there's not much there to get the audience excited, don't lean on the title for a shot of adrenaline. The effort to improve is ongoing, and the feedback from everyone is appreciated.
Chris

Thanks for your honesty and integrity, Mr Angelini. Definitely a "live and learn" type of thing.

As for the "is this card even worth it?" discussion. Yeah, it is. If you can pay the "top dog; no competition" price tag, you won't have any regrets I'm sure. Technology wise, it has decent features a mid-range card (yes, keep this in mind: IT'S MEANT TO BE MID RANGE) should have and it's a generational step forward. Is it hands down better than the 1080ti? Will depend on what you play and what type of eye candy you like/want to see. For the big majority of people, I'm sure a 1080ti is more than plenty still; even a 1080 is plenty still for 1080p/1440p resolutions. This generation has its merits by all means; they're not home runs as the hardware is trying to introduce new features and that is worth something; as I've always said, Ray Tracing is amazing. Is the "Super" worth it over the "vanilla" one? Nah. If you have a 2080 your next upgrade is either next gen or the 2080ti only. This is for the people that was still wondering about whether to upgrade over previous gens or not (the whole "super" refresh) and not to people that is always buying "top dog".

The sad reality, and something everyone needs to keep in mind, is that AMD does not have anything even remotely close to the 2080 (or even the 1080ti still!) siblings and there's nothing we can do but either skip this card or just pay the premium for it. Period. Cry a river like I do every time I see the prices now and deal with it.

Cheers!

 

[lightc]

Technology wise, it has decent features a mid-range card (yes, keep this in mind: IT'S MEANT TO BE MID RANGE)

2080 and midrange... you must be kidding... Since when RTX 2080 or any other x80/xx80 generation was a midrange offer?

 

[-Fran-]

2080 and midrange... you must be kidding... Since when RTX 2080 or any other x80/xx80 generation was a midrange offer?

Whenever nVidia has put a "ti" card in the wild. Or a Titan card for that matter. Everything else becomes second class citizen behind it.

This goes all the way back to the GeForce3 era. I believe TNT, TNT2, GeForce, GeForce2 and GeForce256 didn't have the "ti" branding. At least they haven't used the "MX" moniker for a long time now. And the "Titan" branding, I think, is just bragging to AMD. From memory alone, the "ti" moniker was from "Titanium"; can't really remember that one.

For this generation is a bit more straight forward:

2060, 2070 and 2080 are low mid, mid mid and high mid; then 2080ti is high end and Titan is bragging rights. It's been like that for a few generations now.

Cheers!

 

[lightc]

Wow... smart thinking- you're now labelling whole Nvidia's gaming graphics card offer in one mid-range line. 2080 is not marketed as a mid-range offer, and neither is its price&performance...

Whenever nVidia has put a "ti" card in the wild. Or a Titan card for that matter. Everything else becomes second class citizen behind it.

So the GTX 1660 Ti is superior to your 2080 then? lol

 

[-Fran-]

Wow... smart thinking- you're now labelling whole Nvidia's gaming graphics card offer in one mid-range line. 2080 is not marketed as a mid-range offer, and neither is its price&performance...

Don't blame it on me, but competition and marketing teams.

If you want to think that price dictates technological intention for segments, I won't argue with you as it is a belief.

My point is simple, and it goes back to some generations ago where nVidia did have a clear mid-range segmentation through their "big chip" and "small chip" parings. Now, their "small chip" is enough to beat the whole AMD line up, so they can charge you top dog dollar for what is meant to be a mid-range card. The GPU codenames have significance, so my angle comes from there; the numbers you see on the boxes are marketing wash out. You can also look at the innards of each GPU and compare them among each other. There's plenty of ways to understand where I'm coming from in what I'm saying.

Cheers!

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

Thank you for the sentiment TJ. To be fair to the rest of the TH team, the first title was my doing. I was trying to stay relevant to what I've been working on for the past few weeks and knew the refreshed 2080 Super @ 6% faster than 2080 FE wouldn't be much of an attention-getter on its own. Past the title, Navi wasn't a focus in the story at all, aside from providing comparison data in the chart, so I was fine with the change. Lesson learned--if there's not much there to get the audience excited, don't lean on the title for a shot of adrenaline. The effort to improve is ongoing, and the feedback from everyone is appreciated.
Chris

Good on you for owning up to it. If the launch is a boring launch, then don't try to sensationalize it, I agree with that sentiment.

 

[chickenballs]

I bought my 1080ti for $759 not quite two years ago and have been very happy with its performance. Now the 2080 Super reportedly gets ~17% higher performance for only $700 an 8% price cut. That sounds like a great deal to me.

The 2080ti reportedly gets 33% higher performance than my 1080ti but for a recent price of $969 new (MSI Ventus) after rebate at local Microcenter over weekend, a 28% hjgher price than my 1080ti.

Neither of these two new options are quite enough to entice me sell my 1080ti and buy either. But this incessant whining about prices gets real old and boring.

wow
2 years later the new 2080 which has 2 gig less vram is 17% better in some games.
While the true successor to the gtx 1080ti costs as much as the older gtx Titan.

why don't you compare the price to performance gain ratio between gtx 980Ti and gtx 1080Ti and then with the rtx 2080 vanilla/super and the 2080Ti

 

[ingtar33]

I paid $700, not sure that you overpaying $759 is relevant. The 2080 Super is 6 percent faster than my 1080 ti over 30 games or so. Again not sure why you think 17 percent. Maybe you just play Wolfenstein or something lol. We have incessant whining about prices because we have the same card for 3 years. 1080 ti, 2080, now 2080 Super. Pathetic. And we should be comparing the 2080 custom models to the 2080 super founder's pricing, since the 2080 founder's pricing was just price gouging for early adopters, and not the MSRP. We can whine about nVidia's transparent manipulation of MSRP. The fact that this review actually had the gall to compare perf/dollar by comparing $800 (for the $700 card) vs $700 is unbelievable.

Any review worth its salt would point these things out. Instead I see 9/10 and 8/10 everywhere for the same perf/dollar for the last 3 years. Apparently we don't even have anything but paid product promotions anymore. It's disgusting.

I couldn't have said it better myself. best post in the thread.

 

[Gurg]

wow
2 years later the new 2080 which has 2 gig less vram is 17% better in some games.
While the true successor to the gtx 1080ti costs as much as the older gtx Titan.

why don't you compare the price to performance gain ratio between gtx 980Ti and gtx 1080Ti and then with the rtx 2080 vanilla/super and the 2080Ti

Never owned a 980ti because it just didn't meet my needs. Went from an overclocked to the max 680 gtx modded with a closed loop water cooler running a 1080 monitor; to a pair of OC 970s in sli running a 1440 monitor and to OC 980s in sli running a 4k monitor 4 years ago and now have an OC 1080ti. The 1080ti gets about the same Time Spy/FS Ultra numbers as the 980sli but without other issues associated with sli.

An overclocked 1080ti, 2080 and now the 2080 super will do a decent job on a 4k monitor, but the 2080ti is the first GPU that can really claim to be a good 4k GPU. The original total cost of my two 980s ($1160) was just a little less than the cost of a lower tier 2080ti. But at this point there is no rational reason for me to buy either the 2080s or a 2080ti.

 

[Cookingcarnitas]

Seems like a lot of people were against the super versions early on, but now they look to be the obvious choice? At least from what I was reading. And looking at Amazon the prices seem very similar now for super and job super versions.