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Even with a beastly testbed, CPU bottlenecks start to limit performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 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.
It is unusual for NVIDIA to lead off a new consumer gaming GPU generation with a Ti variant. Historically, the company has always launched new cards based on a slightly cut-down version of their new chip and then followed that release with a Titan model or Ti variant as many as ten months later. The GTX 1080 Ti launched ten months after the GTX 1080 was revealed back in the summer of 2016.
Ray tracing isn’t actually a new technology – it’s been used for years in film. Nvidia is, however, the first company that has managed to use ray tracing in real time, and it’s that ‘real time’ part which is obviously a necessity for video games. Finally, the TU102 GPU inside the RTX 2080 Ti is a bigger, more bad-ass version of the RTX 2080’s TU104 GPU in every aspect, including those swanky new RT and tensor cores.
In its optimum performance form, with a game that takes advantage of DLSS technology, has the ability to be twice as fast as GTX 1080 Ti whilst rendering better-looking imagery. To see how these new cards perform with a typical 2018 gaming setup, we’ve been testing both the Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti with a 27-inch Asus ROG Swift PG279Q monitor and a slew of demanding AAA titles. This monitor has 1440p resolution and up to 165Hz refresh rates with G-Sync, so it’s a great match for these new cards. EK® recommends the purchase of a retention backplate which improves the aesthetics of your graphics cards, but also provides additional passive cooling to the GPU core and circuit board VRM section.
Nvidia’s new cards include support for both real-time ray tracing and AI-powered anti-aliasing. Ray tracing is the big new capability with this generation, and it’s used to generate real-time light reflections and cinematic effects in games. That’s all according to Nvidia, at least, because we haven’t been able to fully test ray tracing or DLSS with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti units we’ve been reviewing over the past week. Until Microsoft delivers its Windows 10 October 2018 Update, none of Nvidia’s fancy new tech will be available for regular games.
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 RTX 2080 Ti, 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.
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 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.
Additionally, Tensor Cores drive a new technology called Deep Learning Super Sampling, which can increase resolution while applying anti-aliasing at the same time. The GeForce RTX NVLink™ bridge connects two NVLink SLI-ready graphics cards with 50X the transfer bandwidth of previous technologies. This means you can count on super-smooth gameplay at maximum resolutions with ultimate visual fidelity in GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 graphics cards. Dedicated ray tracing hardware enables fast real-time ray tracing with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions, and global illumination. The new models have the same understated black slab design of the old ones, but have newer ninth-gen Intel processors and the latest GTX and RTX graphics from Nvidia as well as better display options.
With ray tracing set to ‘High’ and the resolution set to 4K, I saw frame rates average to a miserable 35fps. However, once I activated DLSS, frame rates suddenly jumped up to a very respectable 55fps. That’s an astonishing improvement gtx 1080 8gb of 20fps, which really does make a massive difference. Meanwhile, SLI is once again supported by Nvidia’s latest range of graphics card if you have the Nvidia NVLink, but game support is limited at the time of writing.