Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition - Review 2022

When Nvidia unveiled its then-flagship GeForce GTX 1080 in the outset half of 2022, we'd never take expected to wait more than 2 years for its next graphics-card compages. The "Pascal" architecture backside the GTX x-series graphics cards has anile very well, only anile it has. It'due south finally time for it to movement aside: The GeForce RTX 2080 is here, powered past the all-new "Turing" compages. We got our hands on the $799 GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition, likewise as its beefier brother, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, and put them to a load of tests. The bottom line? This card was well worth the wait, and it's a killer for all-out, detail-cranked 4K gaming, including gaming with loftier-refresh-charge per unit gaming monitors and in HDR. Early on adopters won't be disappointed, just the card's ii marquee features, which nosotros'll go to in a moment, are technologies in their infancy. So long as you lot don't listen paying a premium for that futurity-proofing, you'll discover this bill of fare a animal and a practical culling to the already-great GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Simply know that part of the price you're paying is a bet on the hereafter.

Run into the GeForce RTX: What's New?

The biggest news with the GeForce RTX is its hardware-accelerated ray tracing, courtesy of new RT processing cores congenital into the card itself. Ray tracing allows for photorealistic lighting and shadow effects in games. While not a new concept, ray tracing has thus far been impractical to employ in real time due to its massive functioning overhead, just the RTX 20 series is designed to modify that. (Meet more about ray tracing in the Nvidia RTX cards at sister site ExtremeTech.)

The other major technological innovation with the RTX 20 serial is its support for a technology known as Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS). Enabled past new Tensor processing cores on the graphics card, DLSS uses AI to polish the edges of in-game objects more efficiently than the traditional approach, anti-aliasing. Where it's employed, Nvidia claims substantial operation increases are possible with DLSS.

The oddest part virtually this review is that you won't see testing or formal benchmarks with ray tracing or DLSS existence an explicit factor. The obstacle? The simple fact there were no games or benchmarks available at this writing that fully supported either engineering. Many upcoming games have already been advertised with support, but it'due south unlikely that existing games will get the same treatment. The current situation therefore makes it a bit hard to judge the value of the GeForce RTX 20-series cards relative to current cards. At $799, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition commands significantly more cash than the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition$549.00 at Nvidia it replaces in Nvidia's lineup.

That said, the value of the RTX 20 series doesn't swivel entirely on its back up of these new technologies. The card also brings much improved performance over the GTX 10 series to all games and benchmarks I tested, especially at a 4K resolution. Nvidia claims the new GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards offer up to twice the functioning of the predecessor GTX 1080, but that's bold the game in question supports DLSS. I'll get to the benchmarks shortly plenty; for at present, join me every bit I delve into the groundwork of the GeForce RTX twenty series and why information technology'due south such a big deal.

Down Retention Lane: Turing and Its Lineage

Nvidia introduced Pascal, Turing'due south architectural predecessor, in the offset half of 2022. It was a milestone for the company because it was the first fourth dimension in four years that it had shrunk its manufacturing procedure. Expressed in nanometers, the manufacturing process is the minimum altitude betwixt transistors on a computer bit. In a nutshell, the smaller the distance, the more transistors that can exist packed into the aforementioned infinite. The number of transistors correlates to computing ability, and so the more y'all have of them, the meliorate, all else being equal. That'southward the premise underpinning Moore's law.

Pascal was based on a 16nm process, considerably smaller than the 28nm process of the before "Kepler" and "Maxwell" architectures information technology replaced. That alone gave it a massive operation advantage. (Maxwell was introduced in 2022, only information technology used the aforementioned 28nm process as the Kepler architecture that Nvidia introduced in 2022.) Fast-forward to the 2nd one-half of 2022, and Turing further reduces the manufacturing process to 12nm. (Information technology'south arguably a refinement of the current 16nm procedure, merely let's let technicalities be technicalities.) That helped the RTX 2080 reviewed here nearly double the transistor count of the GTX 1080, to thirteen.6 billion from seven.2 billion.

Here's a expect Nvidia's graphics-carte du jour architectures, their manufacturing processes, and their transistor counts over the years...

Successive generations snowballed endless technical improvements, and that's not to mention the new technologies that were introduced along the way. (Support for Microsoft DirectX 12 and HDR come up to heed as ii of the almost recent.) So, transistor count doesn't tell the total story, merely it has a big function in the endgame of achieving more computational power. It's ironic that the biggest leaps in computing are often made by making things smaller, but it's true, and that's why Turing is big news.

Core Shift: RT Cores Versus CUDA Cores

Like several preceding generations of GeForce graphics cards, the RTX 20 series uses CUDA processing cores for traditional 3D processing. What's new in the GeForce RTX 20 serial is its addition of ray tracing (or RT) cores, which allow for hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

The GTX 10 serial could do ray tracing operations, which is why I pointed out that ray tracing isn't a new concept, but it had to do them in software, which is too slow for real-time application. Nvidia rates the GTX 1080's ray tracing functioning at just 0.89 gigarays per 2nd, whereas the new RTX 2080 does 8 gigarays per second. That's a massive increase, and it should make information technology applied to do ray tracing in real-time. (Again, I was not able to test ray tracing in action however; no software was available. So, nosotros all have only what Nvidia says to go on.)

Speaking of CUDA cores, the RTX twenty serial brings improvements at that place, too. Turing not only has more CUDA cores to begin with, only Nvidia claims that they offer about fifty percent more performance per cadre than nether the Pascal architecture. The Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) on the graphics card (that is, where the CUDA cores reside) have been redesigned for Turing. Much of the CUDA-core performance increase comes from a 2d parallel execution unit of measurement that sits next to each CUDA cadre, allowing information technology to process both integer and floating-point operations simultaneously. In addition, Turing has a redesigned SM memory path, which Nvidia says is good for 50 pct higher constructive memory bandwidth than under Pascal.

Dramatic Tens-ion: The New Tensor Cores

Tensor cores debuted in 2022 on Nvidia'due south Volta compages, simply they haven't been introduced in Nvidia's gaming-focused GeForce graphics cards until at present. Their use is best illustrated in Turing's DLSS feature.

If you're a gamer, yous've probably noticed the "jaggies" that tin can announced on the edges of in-game objects. Y'all can get a ameliorate visual feel if y'all enable anti-aliasing to smooth them out, only doing so carries a significant performance penalty. Anti-aliasing can be done a number of ways; Nvidia'southward go-to method up until now has been temporal anti-aliasing, or TAA. Information technology works past taking multiple scenes equally input, and massaging them into a single paradigm for one final, better-looking result. This process incurs a lot of overhead, though, because the graphics menu must render all the input frames at the final resolution. (So, if you're running a game at 1080p, the input frames demand to be 1080p, as well.)

DLSS goes about this differently. It reduces overhead because information technology doesn't require every bit many input samples. Instead, it uses the AI capabilities of the Tensor cores to predict what the other inputs should have looked similar, and it renders a scene that is like to what TAA would accomplish with roughly half the overhead.

That's just the operation aspect of DLSS. It'south also designed to amend prototype quality by "learning" how the ideal epitome should await. TAA tin innovate a variety of visual imperfections, such as blurriness and general loss of detail. DLSS can be trained by having information technology examine "ideally rendered" sample images to judge its output with those ideally rendered images, but in real-time. In curt, DLSS tin can accurately guess what something should look like without doing most of the traditional processing work, improving performance.

DLSS isn't a plug-in technology for existing games, nonetheless. Numerous upcoming games should be adopting the technology, but as of this writing, there's nothing to test with.

Other New Technologies

I'll briefly summarize iii other key shading enhancements that the GeForce RTX xx series brings to the developer's tabular array. The commencement is Variable Rate Shading (VRS).

VRS allows developers to shade parts of the screen in a more detailed fashion than others. In a racing game, for example, shading the road, which looks similar a blur to brainstorm with, isn't every bit important equally shading the car and the horizon. This engineering allows the graphics card's processing power to be leveraged more than selectively and thus efficiently.

The next is Texture-Space Shading. This tactic is designed to eliminate duplicate shading work past shading objects in a texture space and and so saving them to memory, where they can exist resampled or reused.

The final is Multi-View Rendering (MVR). The GeForce GTX 10 series is able to render two views in one pass via its Single Laissez passer Stereo feature, but only from the aforementioned viewpoint (just a dissimilar X offset). MVR on the RTX 20 serial allows multiple views to be rendered that don't have to first at the aforementioned viewpoint. That allows for MVR, theoretically, to be engaged more than ofttimes, again thereby increasing efficiency.

Those are the condensed versions of these three technologies, listen you. As I've noted a few times already, how this all pans out volition depend on what happens once PC Labs has had a chance to test supported games.

To wrap upwards the last couple of tech-talk sections, here's a look at the schematic of an SM on Turing.

Each Turing SM includes 64 CUDA cores, eight Tensor cores, and an RT core processing engine.

SLI Back up: Run across NVLink

Scalable Link Interface, much better known equally SLI, is Nvidia's method to conjoin multiple graphics cards for improved functioning. The company, still, has been steadily restricting SLI support to its higher-end GPUs.

In the instance of the GeForce RTX 20 serial, information technology's available on the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti only. Pascal, by comparison, supported information technology on the next grade of card downwards (the GeForce GTX 1070$399.00 at Nvidia, for which the RTX 2070 will be the replacement when it'southward released). Just even on Pascal, information technology was restricted; before that, Nvidia offered back up for SLI with Maxwell cards all the way down to the entry-level models. Furthermore, the RTX 20 serial supports simply two-way SLI. Gone is three- and 4-fashion SLI back up that you could do back in Maxwell days. (That said, reviews of desktops with multiple GPUs back then showed limited returns with more than than two cards, anyway.)

Although SLI has been around for over a decade, information technology hasn't seen anything close to universal support in the development or gaming communities. As a consumer, you lot'd expect double the operation if you connected ii cards in SLI, merely that won't be the case if a game doesn't fully back up the applied science. Therefore, my stance on SLI has always been this: Buy the single fastest graphics card you lot can afford.

To string two RTX 2080 graphics cards together, you'll demand to invest in a new $79 NVLink bridge. The NVLink bridge provides 25 gigabytes per second of bandwidth in each management for a bidirectional bandwidth of l gigabytes per second. NVLink is different from Pascal's own high-bandwidth bridge considering all communication between the graphics cards is done over the NVLink bridge. The connector is under a cap on the bill of fare's tiptop edge.

The benefit of this is improved display-output capabilities. Ii Pascal cards in SLI supported a 4K display at 60Hz. With its single NVLink bridge, the GeForce RTX 2080 supports 8K output, 4K at 144Hz with Surround support, or 5K at 75Hz. For 8K with Surround support, yous'll need to dues up for a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and invest in a second NVLink span. It's a pretty safe bet that SLI on the RTX 20 series volition be a niche marketplace given the likely usage cases and the cost.

GeForce RTX 2080 Specifications and Pricing

Nvidia had announced three GeForce RTX 20-series card families as of this writing: the GeForce RTX 2070, the RTX 2080, and the elite RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti cards are available at present, with the RTX 2070 slated for an Oct 2022 launch.

All 3 cards will be available from Nvidia's lath partners, such as EVGA, MSI, PNY, and Zotac, likewise as from Nvidia itself. Nvidia's own cards come up in the grade of a "Founders Edition," which is what's being reviewed here. Past selling the Founders Edition cards in the style that it is with Turing and the RTX xx series, Nvidia is acting essentially like one of its ain lath partners, producing its own tweaked version of the reference carte du jour. The base spec for the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti is actually a bear on lower than for the Founders Edition cards.

The Founders Edition version comes at a cost. The GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition commands $100 over the suggested pricing that Nvidia is putting forward for basic RTX 2080 reference cards. I'll discuss Founders Edition-specific differences in just a moment; for now, here's a await at how the RTX 2080 Founders Edition stacks up against the GTX 1080 Founders Edition that it replaces in Nvidia's lineup...

This comparison doesn't include the number of RT or Tensor cores, because they didn't exist on the GTX 1080 (Pascal). Information technology's a similar story with the number of CUDA cores, as detailed before; they're redesigned on Turing to be more efficient, so a one-to-one comparison with a Pascal card doesn't tell the full story.

This is a expert opportunity to introduce another technological jump on Turing: GDDR6 retentivity. Nvidia says that GDDR6 is improved in just about every measurable style over the GDDR5X memory that the GTX 1080 used, which itself was bleeding edge at its release. The RTX 2080 has 40 pct improved memory speed (14Gbps versus 10Gbps for the GTX 1080) while improving power efficiency past 20 percentage. A larger L2 cache on the Turing architecture further helps its memory performance.

Another interesting comparison is the dice size. At 545 foursquare millimeters, the RTX 2080'south dice is virtually 75 percent larger than the GTX 1080's. The graphics bill of fare it sits on isn't whatever larger, of course, but it's a hint that the yields from the manufacturing procedure must be quite good for Nvidia to produce a chip of that size.

I've already talked nearly transistors, and the core and memory clocks I'll discuss afterwards, so that leaves just the terminal line item untouched: the toll. I'll provide a value analysis of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition later in this article, just for now, let's but say this: It'due south a lot of money.

The RTX 2080 Founders Edition is a $100 price hike over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. The latter debuted in 2022, so this is more than inflation at work. AMD's lack of competition at the high end hasn't exactly encouraged Nvidia to go along the prices downward, just the going rate for GPUs at this tier has been on the rise for some time at present. Looking back, the GeForce GTX 980, predecessor of the GTX 1080, was $549 at launch.

RTX 2080: The Founders Edition Versus the Reference Spec

Let'southward take a line-by-line look at the cadre specs for the Founders Edition card versus how Nvidia has outlined the "basic" RTX 2080 boards.

The outside is where you'll find the other differences. The reference bill of fare is only a board; Nvidia'southward board partners are responsible for implementing their own cooling solutions. Nvidia did merely that with the RTX 2080 Founders Edition. It uses dual 13-blade axial fans, a vapor-chamber heatsink, and a metal baseplate that covers the back of the card and wraps around. This is a fundamentally different arroyo than the blower-way cooler that debuted on the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. I'll hash out this in a scrap.

Another departure with the RTX 2080 Founders Edition is its power. Whereas the GTX 1080 Founders Edition offered about 38 watts of overclocking headroom, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition offers about 55 watts. Information technology volition be interesting to meet how the board partners implement ability solutions on their RTX 2080 models.

RTX 2080 Founders Edition Connectivity and Ability

Let's, at final, take a concrete await at the RTX 2080 Founders Edition card on the bench here.

It owes its dashing advent to the metal heatsinks that totally envelop the board, with twin xiii-bladed fans completing the look. (I'll talk over cooling functioning afterwards the benchmarks.)

The GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition requires half-dozen-pivot and viii-pin power connectors. It'south thirstier for electricity than the outgoing GTX 1080 Founders Edition, which required a unmarried viii-pin. Information technology also helps requite the carte headroom for overclocking.

The video-out connectors on the RTX 2080 FE are three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors, which can drive display resolutions of 8K with a 60Hz refresh charge per unit. In addition, in that location's an HDMI 2.0b connector for 4K output at 60Hz.

The last port is VirtualLink, a USB Type-C-style connector that's somewhat easy to overlook. This port is designed for next-generation virtual reality (VR) headsets. Current VR headsets, such every bit the Oculus Rift, require multiple cables to be connected for video, data, and power transfer. VirtualLink provides four lanes of DisplayPort video-out connectivity, USB three.1 Gen2 support for data transfer, and up to 27 watts of power for an all-in-one solution.

The last piece of connectivity is the NVLink connector. The GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition has one of them along the elevation edge of the card, merely back from the rear-facing connector plate. Unlike in earlier generations, it'south hidden nether a cap that pulls off if you demand to expose the connector.

Test Arrangement Setup & Notes

Equally I noted early on in this review, no DLSS or ray tracing games were available every bit of this publish date to examination those capabilities on the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition. I've done the side by side all-time affair and included as many mod Microsoft DirectX 12-enabled games equally possible. The DirectX 12 API has seen widespread adoption since Nvidia's release of Pascal in 2022. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the newest example of a game in the PC Labs criterion regimen that supports the applied science, simply it's far from the merely ane.

Some other focus in this review is at running games at a 4K (iii,840-by-2,160-pixel) resolution. At that place'southward piffling point to spending this kind of cash on a graphics card without pushing it to its limits. I also tested at more than traditional resolutions of 1,920 by i,080 and ii,560 by 1,440.

No VR-specific benchmarks were run on the RTX 2080 Founders Edition. VR headsets' requirements oasis't significantly changed since 2022. Pascal-based cards, starting with the mid-level GeForce GTX 1060$299.00 at Nvidia, were well capable of powering VR headsets, so doing so would hardly exist a claiming for the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition. It will be time to revisit VR when new VirtualLink-supporting VR headsets come to market.

PC Labs re-tested all the not-RTX graphics cards in the charts beneath with the latest available drivers. All cards were tested in the same testbed to maximize focus on the GPU performance. The exam bench comprises the fastest mainstream Intel CPU of the moment, the Intel Core i7-8700K, 16GB of DDR4 memory from Thousand.Skill, and a solid-state kick drive. The test motherboard is the Aorus Z370 Gaming seven.

You'll see the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition's results in these charts, as well; I'll give that menu a separate analysis in its own review. The focus here will be on how the RTX 2080 Founders Edition compares to the GTX 1080 Founders Edition and, to a bottom extent, the AMD Radeon Vega 64, the GTX 1080's key AMD contest. (AMD has not yet unveiled its RTX xx-series competitor.)

Following is the blow-by-blow breakdown of testing and overclocking performed on the RTX 2080 Founders Edition. If this is more detail than you want or need, feel free to curlicue down to the section "And so, What Do All These Numbers Mean? Computing the Value Equation" for the TLDR version.

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Burn down Strike Ultra

Constructed benchmarks can be good predictors of real-globe gaming performance. UL'due south (formerly Futuremark'southward) circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to for 4K-based gaming. I'm looking only at the graphics subscore, not the overall score.

Whoa. Already I'm seeing the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition brand double-digit gains over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, putting upward 130 pct of its functioning. It also produces 98 percent of the GTX 1080 Ti Iron'southward performance, the Pascal flagship. The latter isn't exactly a victory, as the RTX 2080 Founders Edition is more expensive than the outgoing GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition$1,350.00 at Newegg. But allow's practise more testing earlier jumping to a determination.

3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme

This is Futuremark's DirectX 12-enabled benchmark for predicting the functioning of DirectX 12-enabled games. It uses major features of the API, including asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading.

The disparity betwixt the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and the GTX 1080 Founders Edition increased further in this criterion, scoring 45 percentage college in the base examination and jumping to 52 percent higher at the Extreme preset. Information technology's notable here that the RTX 2080 Founders Edition did amend than the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition past about 16 per centum in base of operations Time Spy and thirteen percent in Extreme. This is a solid indicator that the Turing cards are more optimized for DirectX 12 than their predecessors. As a footnote, the AMD Radeon Vega 64 didn't stack up also against the GTX 1080 Founders Edition in this criterion every bit it did in the DirectX 11-based 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra.

Unigine Superposition (DirectX 12)

Our final constructed criterion is Unigine's 2022 release, Superposition. This criterion does incorporate ray tracing, but it'south washed in software, not hardware, and thus doesn't utilize the RTX 2080 Founders Edition's RT cores.

The RTX 2080 Founders Edition'due south gains over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition fell as the resolution increased. Whereas the RTX 2080 Founders Edition is 67 percent faster than the GTX 1080 Founders Edition at a 1080p resolution, that number falls to 38 percent at 4K, and 27 percent at 8K. The RTX 2080 Founders Edition falls behind the GTX 1080 Ti at 8K, only edges information technology out at the other resolutions. The gains are solid for the RTX 2080 Founders Edition over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, but less so over the GTX 1080 Ti (which is $100 cheaper than the RTX 2080 Founders Edition).

Real-World Gaming

At present, how near some testing of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition using games you can actually play? PC Labs uses the built-in benchmark routine in all of the games beneath for consistency. Wait in the charts themselves for the settings used, which are typically the highest in-game presets and DirectX 12 (if available).

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix's spanking-new title is the get-go real-world test hither. Although Nvidia has demoed this game using the RTX 20 series ray tracing technology, the initial release of the game bachelor at this writing did not support ray tracing. (Information technology's supposed to exist added in a post-release patch.)

These cards produce silky-shine frame rates at 1440p and below, and so permit'due south wait at the 4K numbers. The RTX 2080 Founders Edition shows its greatest gains over the GTX 1080 Atomic number 26 at this resolution, a proceeds of 41 percent, a trend you volition run into continue. Nonetheless, its 45-frame-per-second (fps) boilerplate is beneath the 60fps I was looking for. The same holds true of the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, and that's as fast as it gets. I'll have to revisit this when the ray tracing patch is available to see how turning that feature on affects the performance.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The 2022 predecessor to Shadow of the Tomb Raider is nevertheless a great, demanding benchmark.

I'm seeing a pattern here. The performance gains between the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and the GTX 1080 Founders Edition aren't as pronounced with benchmarks and software that don't leverage the very latest engineering science. (I saw this in the synthetic benchmarks, going between 3DMark Burn Strike and the newer 3DMark Fourth dimension Spy.) The RTX 2080 Founders Edition shows a 12 to 22 per centum comeback over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, but it falls behind the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition at all resolutions. (In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition topped the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition.) That aside, 55fps at 4K for a notwithstanding-demanding game is pretty skillful for a single menu.

Hitman (2016)

An early DirectX 12-enabled game, Hitman isn't quite equally demanding now as it was at release.

Side by side to the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, the gains here for the RTX 2080 Founders Edition ranged from just nine percent at 1080p to 23 per centum at 4K. It was cervix-and-cervix with the GTX 1080 Ti across all resolutions. In addition to newer games showing greater gains, another trend emerges: The RTX 2080 Founders Edition'south performance advantage over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition increases with resolution.

Far Cry v and Far Cry Primal

We're looping these ii games together since they share an engine and thus benchmark virtually the same.

The Dunia engine these games are based on doesn't use DirectX 12. The RTX 2080 Founders Edition held a xiv percentage performance advantage over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition at 1080p, increasing to 31 percentage (Far Cry 5) and 37 percent (Fundamental) at 4K. It essentially ties the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition at 4K in both games. Permit's move on.

Concluding Fantasy XV Windows Edition Benchmark

We'll have a respite from fps-based benchmarks for the stand-alone Windows benchmark for Concluding Fantasy XV, which generates a proprietary score...

Hither, the performance gap increases betwixt the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and the GTX 1080 Founders Edition with resolution, as information technology has in previous tests, culminating at 30 percentage at 4K. It'south within 1 percent of the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition in that scenario.

World of Tanks Encore

This is some other non-fps-based criterion that's available as a costless download. It'south not super-demanding, merely it'south nevertheless a reliable test and representative of an open-globe, massively multiplayer title.

The RTX 2080 Founders Edition'southward tendency to relatively perform better at higher resolutions against the GTX 1080 Founders Edition continues. It scored xix percentage amend at 1080p, but the advantage leapt to 30 per centum at 4K. I suspect the RTX 2080 Founders Edition's faster memory subsystem may be responsible for a skillful chunk of that performance proceeds. Confronting the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, though, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition even so doesn't proceeds ground.

Tom Clancy: The Division

A 2022 release that'south still tough to handle, here'due south a final DirectX 12-specific game examination.

This game doesn't buck the trends observed in previous games. The RTX 2080 Founders Edition sees up to a 33 percentage performance improvement over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, but it stays within a few percentage points of the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition.

...and How Virtually Some Legacy Games?

Also included here are benchmarks from four legacy titles, for sometime times' sake: Bioshock: Infinite, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and the 2022 version of Tomb Raider.

Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs aren't the most well-optimized games; they're still a bear to run at 4K. The RTX 2080 Founders Edition's fps is playable at 4K across each game, gaining anywhere from 26 percent (Hitman: Absolution) to 43 percent (Tomb Raider 2022) over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. It negotiated a few percentage points over or under the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition's performance, as it did in about of the other, more recent game benchmarks.

A Notation on HDR, and Overclocking

Additionally, PC Labs tested 3 of the above games with high dynamic range (HDR) enabled to encounter how it affected performance on the RTX 2080 Founders Edition. The tests were run on an Acer Predator X27 monitor supporting HDR and a 4K native resolution.

The tests were run using the aforementioned in-game settings equally in the results shown earlier. The frame rates are presented beneath as boilerplate frames per second with HDR on (and followed in parens, off)...

Equally you lot can see, enabling HDR in these games had piddling bear on on the RTX 2080 Founders Edition'southward performance. Assuming yous take the cash for an HDR-enabled monitor, enabling the engineering science in-game, where it is supported, should be a no-brainer.

I also spent some time overclocking the RTX 2080 using Nvidia'due south Scanner, a a new auto-overclocking feature, though fourth dimension to experiment much was scarce in advance of this release, Nvidia supplied an experimental version of EVGA'south Precision X1 overclocking software, which employed the scanning part. I used the built-in Nvidia Scanner feature to automatically overclock the RTX 2080 Founders Edition card with just a few clicks.

The review window allowed trivial time to do more this, so future RTX card reviews will explore some of the more avant-garde overclocking features. I measured the before-and-later on overclock performance divergence by rerunning some of the benchmarks at the same detail settings every bit earlier, summarized below...

The differences were not huge, almost within the margin of error, just they were consistent. The Nvidia Scanner overclock left the retentivity clock untouched at 7GHz, while the GPU core reached 1,950MHz during a run through 3DMark Time Spy Farthermost. The GPU temperature peaked at 74 degrees C in that test, indicating that at that place's headroom for further overclocking.

Thermal Operation

For a real-world stress test, I played through 25 minutes' worth of Far Cry 5 and recorded the card's core frequency, memory frequency, and its operating temperature. Information technology's graphed below without the memory clock shown; that stayed at a constant vii,000MHz (7GHz) throughout.

The RTX 2080 Founders Edition'southward cadre clock was very stable. Remember, this card is overclocked from the factory. Nvidia specifies an 1,800MHz core clock, up from ane,710MHz for the base of operations card. PC Labs' data indicated an boilerplate clock of one,865MHz. That isn't an unfamiliar phenomenon; I've routinely observed Pascal-based cards going higher up their rated clocks if they got plenty power and ran cool enough. And running cool is something the RTX 2080 Founders Edition does exceptionally well. The GPU core topped 63 degrees C in this testing, averaging 55 degrees C. The card is rated for a 88 degrees C ceiling, so there should exist plenty of overclocking headroom.

The dual axial fans were remarkably quiet under load, too. I had to put an ear right upwardly to the carte du jour to hear anything, different, say, the Radeon RX Vega 64 menu, whose whoosh was readily audible from 5 anxiety away. At times, though, I did notice some coil whine when the carte was nether benchmarking load, with the pitch shifting with scene changes. I'm not certain if that's specific to this test platform or not, merely PC Labs didn't observe information technology with other GPUs tested in the same rig for this review. That said, once I put the side back on the chassis, it was practically imperceptible.

The potential downside to the RTX 2080 Founders Edition's dual-fan cooling blueprint is that it exhausts about of the air directly into the instance. The GTX 1080 Iron used a blower-style cooler that sent frazzle air out the back of the card. For small-form-factor desktops and other confined scenarios, you lot'll have to ensure excellent airflow through the case to get rid of the heat. The GTX 1080 Founders Edition'due south cooling solution was amend in that regard, but louder, and that card ran a lot hotter than the RTX 2080 Founders Edition does.

And so, What Exercise All These Numbers Mean? Calculating the Value Equation

Beyond all game-specific (that is, non-synthetic) benchmarks PC Labs ran, including the results from all tested resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4K), the RTX 2080 Founder's Edition averaged a 26.8 percent performance improvement over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. Isolating the 4K results, since 4K is what this card is designed for, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition averaged a beefier 32.2 percent increment.

Is that enough of a performance bump to make unmarried-bill of fare 4K gaming a reality? Not definitively. Nvidia's marketing materials played upward the RTX 2080 hit 60fps or greater in many popular titles but didn't disclose the settings. Beyond half-dozen games tested that were released in the last three years, PC Labs saw an boilerplate of 56fps at 4K, the everyman coming from Shadow of the Tomb Raider (45fps). That's using the maximum in-game presets for the benchmarks, mind you lot. That's impressive performance from a single GPU, only it emphasizes that you nevertheless may take to fiddle with the visual-quality sliders to get consistent 60fps-plus performance at 4K.

The current GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition gives the RTX 2080 Founders Edition a run for its money on raw frame rates. Those two cards are not supposed to be direct competitors; the RTX 2080 Ti, not the RTX 2080, is the ostensible replacement for the GTX 1080 Ti. All the same, the $699 debut price of the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition makes information technology off-white game. It was a dead heat between the cards when I averaged the gaming benchmark results, and that included isolating the 4K results.

At present, I'm not making an argument to purchase the GTX 1080 Ti. Rather, I want to underscore that the $100 actress you're paying for the RTX 2080 Founders Edition may non be money well spent unless you plan to take advantage of the Founders Edition's overclocking-focused feature set and boost its operation further.

Also, consider that the RTX 2080 reference cards that Nvidia outlines for its partners should start at $699. (Many will likely go for more than than that.) The RTX 2080 as a card class becomes a much ameliorate value at that price, which was the GTX 1080 Founders Edition'southward going rate when it was released in 2022. PC Labs will accept to get easily on a reference-design partner board to run into how well such a base-model RTX 2080 performs. The manufacturing plant overclock on the RTX 2080's core is decidedly mild, so the reference menu, disallowment whatever clock-speed meddling by partner companies, shouldn't be noticeably slower.

Summing up its performance, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition doesn't offering the generational operation gain that was obvious going from the Maxwell-based GTX 980 to the GTX 1080, just information technology's clearly faster, and especially at 4K. Even mid-level graphics cards for well less than half the price of the RTX 2080 can do very fine 1080p gaming these days, so 4K is where the operation improvement was needed most.

Some other highly notable observation from the testing is that the RTX 2080 Founders Edition showed its best gains in newer games, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that leveraged the latest gaming technology. In that game, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition even outpaced the GTX 1080 Ti by ten percent at 4K. It would exist surprising if this trend doesn't go along equally new games come up out.

Of course, the performance-per-dollar assay against the GTX x serial cards ignores the most exciting aspect of the RTX 20 series: ray tracing and DLSS. It was frustrating to not be able to test or experience these features, as no released games supported them at this review'southward writing. Poring over Nvidia's technical briefs and demos was enough to take the gamer in me drooling over what they promise. The reality, though, is that it'southward going to be a chip of a wait before any of us get to try them. How they'll help or injure performance or alter gameplay isn't yet known.

Verdict? Purchase It for 4K Play Today; Place a Side Bet on the Hereafter

So, let'southward pose the $799 question: Should you lot purchase the RTX 2080 Founders Edition? It's a wildly fast graphics card, offer roughly one-third meliorate functioning than the outgoing GTX 1080 Founders Edition, a gap that's likely to improve as games outset adopting more advanced visual techniques. So, to our optics, it's an easy sell for single-card 4K gaming. That's where it shows the about significant functioning gains over its predecessor. And as the benchmark tables higher up prove, if y'all want to run heavy-lift games at lower resolutions such every bit 1440p and 1080p, you tin hitting frame rates that will leverage much of the refresh range of a high-refresh display at 120Hz or 144Hz.

That said, performance gains lone won't sell this menu if you already accept a high-end carte from the Pascal family. In that situation, above everything else, you need to take organized religion that the ray tracing and DLSS technologies that the GeForce RTX 20 series brings to the table volition match the hype. For that, nosotros've got our fingers crossed. But something tells the states, given how firmly Nvidia is planted in the graphics-bill of fare commuter's seat these days, that we but have to do that on one paw.

[Editors' Annotation: Gabe Carey assisted in the testing for this review.]

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/graphics-cards/29466/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-founders-edition

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