Geforce 20 Series
Unsurprisingly, the RTX 2080 Ti is also the best consumer graphics cards for all-round performance. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition trades performance blows with an overclocked GTX 1080 Ti, but offers the promise of ray tracing and AI-enhanced games for $100 more. It’s joined by a single HDMI 2.0b port, and dual DisplayPort 1.4 connections that are ready for DisplayPort 1.4a in the future.
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.
NvidiaThe GeForce RTX 20-series Founders Edition cards upgrade to dual axial fan design, and those fans—spread farther apart than you see in most graphics cards—come equipped with 13 blades each. They’re sitting atop a card-length heat sink with a heat pipe embedded in the base plate, and a full-length vapor chamber to dissipate heat from the GPU and other components. A forged aluminum shroud covers those cooling components, curving around the end of the card to transform into a sleek backplate with the graphics card’s name emblazoned across it. It’s an utterly gorgeous enclosed design, and by my touch after an intense benchmarking round, that backplate helps dissipate heat as well. These graphics cards cost much, much more than their predecessors, and buying into Nvidia’s futuristic vision requires a big leap of faith—ray traced games won’t even be available when they launch. Are the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition ($799 at Best BuyRemove non-product link orGeForce.com) and RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition ($1,199 at Best BuyRemove non-product link andGeForce.com) worth your money today?
Given the steep price premium of $400 between the two cards, you may be better served by spending the difference in cost in upgrading your SSD or system RAM, or even going springing for a previous-gen GTX 1080 or Ti. That is, at least until more ray tracing games launch to justify this investment. Ray tracing and AI-enabled rendering may be the future, but that future isn’t quite here yet. The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs have reinvented graphics and set a new bar for performance. Powered by the new NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture and the revolutionary NVIDIA RTX platform, the new graphics cards bring together real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading.
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 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.
While Nvidia boss Jensen Huang said that the RTX family of GPUs would start at $499 for the RTX 2070, $699 for the 2080, and $999 for the 2080 Ti, you can’t really pay those prices at the moment. Nvidia is justifying this by primarily selling the Founder’s Edition version of the cards that come overclocked out of the box for the first time ever. Sit down, find your beverage of choice, and let’s go on a journey of discovery to find out if the efforts in implementing tomorrows technology bring benefits to the games of today. The 2070 is not a linear line from the 1070 in price — it’s closer to a 1080, and the 2080 Ti has replaced a Titan X-class card in pricing. With market dominance, and with the biggest high-end competition being Pascal, this is sensible, if not what we wanted to see.
As I explained before, the gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb is now roughly equivalent to a $499 graphics card at the worst of times, and even at the best of times it falls short of the $699 RTX 3080. If you’re in the market for the level of 4K and 1440p gaming, or exceedingly high refresh rates at 1080p, that the RTX 2080 Ti is able to offer, then you’ve got plenty of options. According to our super high-tech GPU choosing algorithm thingamabob , any one of the recently announced Nvidia RTX 30-series cards should suffice. Only if the RTX 2080 Ti is beyond cheap would we recommend it over taking a chance on shopping around for an Nvidia Ampere graphics card. We’re sure to see some graphics card deals during Amazon Prime Day, and Black Friday shortly thereafter, but significant discounts on a high-end card such as this are unlikely.