Geforce® Rtx 2080ti Series
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition rings up for an almost obscene $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899). Although you’ll be able to find this graphics card at a starting price of $1,049 (about £837, AU$1,390), that’s still way more expensive than the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, which touted a $699 (£669, AU$1,129) price tag. DirectX 12 Ultimate is the new standard for next-gen games, taking them to a whole new level of realism and performance with ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and more. With GeForce RTX, you’ll be ready for the most advanced and graphically intensive PC games. Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest technology advancement in history, and Turing is bringing it to computer graphics. Experience AI-processing horsepower that accelerates gaming performance with NVIDIA DLSS 2.0.
Even with a beastly testbed, CPU bottlenecks start to limit performance of the GeForce gtx 1090 at 1440p. That’s unfortunate, as it means maxing out a 144Hz display isn’t always possible—in fact, only four of the games tested break 140fps averages. Instead of the 33 percent lead it had over the 1080 Ti at 4K, we have a 27 percent lead—and it drops even more at 1080p. Larger die sizes mean lower yields, or at least the need to use harvested chips, and Nvidia nets fewer chips per wafer.
There’s also now a full-length vapor chamber that helps make the cards run quieter and cooler. The EK Quantum Vector Series water blocks use an Open Split-Flow cooling engine design which proved to be a superior solution for GPU water blocks. It is characterized by low hydraulic flow restriction, which means that it can be used with weaker water pumps, or pumps running on low-speed settings and still achieve top performance. The jet plate and fin structure geometry have been optimized to provide even flow distribution with minimal losses and optimal performances even when used in reversed water flow scenarios. VirtualLink is an open industry standard that enables next-gen VR headsets to connect with PCs and other devices using a single, high-bandwidth USB Type-C connector.
Throw in some updated ports and that overclockable Intel Core i9 and you’ve got a formidable beast of a laptop. So revolutionary do they consider this new range of graphics cards to be they have eschewed the number increase to a GTX 1180, as would fit their form, and instead changed most things so that we have the RTX 2080 and 2080Ti. RTX, obviously, standing for Ray Tracing, the headline feature of this new set of cards. Our job is to discover if these new toys are something that will revolutionise the industry.
If it weren’t for the badging between the fans, the only way you could tell the two apart would be based on the number of pins in the power connectors. The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition has two eight-pin connectors, while the RTX 2080 Founders Edition has one six-pin and one eight-pin. Note that the features and appearance of the RTX 2080 Ti will vary depending on the board partner you buy your card from. Just like a board-partner card, the Nvidia Founders Edition card under review here has a unique cooling solution.
Sometimes one is faster than the other, but not by more than a few percentage points in most instances. PC Labs uses the built-in benchmark in the following games for consistent testing. Look in the charts themselves for the settings used, which are typically the highest in-game presets . This is the only benchmark here where I observed the performance gains dropping as the resolution increased. The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition held a 59 percent advantage over the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition at 1080p Extreme, but it fell to 23 percent at the 8K Optimized setting. Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance.
From its stellar graphics and overall performance, lightning-fast transfer speeds and surprising endurance, there’s just a whole lot of win underneath that 0.7-inch chassis. And I didn’t even mention the lovely display and cushy, customizable keyboard. The 15.6-inch panel is nice and vivid with a passable audio system and a fullsize keyboard with nice, clicky keys. The gaming laptop also sports a SSD with “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it? speed. If you want serious power in a nice portable design, the Acer Predator Triton is a good gaming laptop that should be at the top of your list. It offers a great mix of graphics and overall power, something you can’t get in every gaming laptop. And thanks to the Turbo option, you can squeeze even more power out of the GPU.
If you’re running a 1080p monitor, no, and even at 1440p the benefits are debatable. You should be running a 4K or at least ultrawide 3440×1440 display before upgrading to the GeForce gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb, or you should be gunning for high framerates on a 144Hz 1440p display. Ray tracing at 1080p with DLSS upscaling to 4K is another option, but again that requires a high-end display.
NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform which enables an increase in computing performance by harnessing the parallel nature of GPU processing. CUDA-compatible applications can assign intensive parallel computing tasks, such as real-time video rendering to the GPU to process, freeing up the computer’s CPU to run other tasks. With Ansel, gamers can compose the gameplay shots they want, pointing the camera in any direction and from any vantage point within a gaming world.
While the speed is impressive the most impressive feature, ray tracing, won’t be available in games until October and will only be available in some games. If you don’t know what that is that’s okay—outside of special effects houses and GPU enthusiast forums ray tracing isn’t a commonly known thing. Ray tracing is a kind of rendering in which each individual virtual ray of light in a computer generated environment is traced from its source to objects it can reflect on. But ray tracing also means those rays can be blocked by a figure who moves in front of them, or distorted as they passes through translucent objects. This means objects in a computer generated environment—like a video game—will reflect light more as they would in the natural world.