Nvidia Geforce Rtx 2080 Specs
The cards move forward with an upgraded-but-familiar Volta architecture, with some changes to the SMs and memory. The new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti ship with reference cards first, and partner cards largely at the same time (with some more advanced models coming 1+ month later), depending on which partner it is. The board partners did not receive pricing or even card naming until around the same time as media, so expect delays in custom solutions.
I’ll be testing a couple of these over the next few weeks to see how they compare, but the figures below should still give you a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of raw performance increase. The point of saying all of this is that a strict Pascal vs. Turing core comparison needs to account for architectural differences that could change how well a “core” performs to begin with. In reviewing “Founders Editions” of the RTX 2080 ($799) and RTX 2080 Ti ($1,199), I ran the usual gamut of benchmarks, and I did the usual double-checks of various games. But all the while, I turned Nvidia’s sales pitch over and over in my mind—because that’s more or less all I could do with the sales pitch.
Although a number of manufacturers produce their own variants of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, for the purposes of this review, I used one of Nvidia’s own Founders Edition cards. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to test Nvidia’s low-end or mid-range GeForce RTX cards, the GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 and their Super variants. However, I have included a popular synthetic benchmark, 3DMark, as part of my tests, so you should be able to get some idea of how they would have performed by comparing my results to the other 3DMark scores available online. Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Super is a very mild upgrade from the previous card, but at least it’s not more expensive. This is a bit of a disappointment, especially if you thought the 2080 Super was going to be a reborn 4K beast of a GPU or that it would be a lot closer to the RTX 2080 Ti. Of course, the RTX 2080 Ti is still way out in front, as expected given its $500 price difference.
But even then, the gtx 1090 is cutting it close to delivering that sacred, silky-smooth frame rate at Ultra-HD resolutions. If you don’t want to deal with compromises, toning down your settings and splurging even more, you’d be much better off going with the top-end Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. Spec for spec, the RTX 2080 is a step up from its predecessors in every way, packing more CUDA cores, faster GDDR6 video memory and even the first very 90Mhz factory overclock on Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards.
Those are both more than enough for getting the best out of 1920×1080 monitors, and neither of them will empty your bank account in the process. For the most part, none of those new Nvidia standards relies on the traditional gtx 1080 8gb “more speed, more CUDA cores” formula of old. Some impressive tech is clearly going into Nvidia’s efforts, including a shift to a 12nm process—and thus making room for new discrete processor cores on the RTX series’ chips.
In fairness, the most obvious place the bottle-necking reared its head was when I was testing the card at 1920×1080, where it often delivered nigh-on identical frame rates as my 2560×1440 results. The bad news is that you might not be able to get the toppest top marks if the rest of your PC is starting to show its age. 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. At present, GDDR6 runs approximately a 20% higher BOM cost than GDDR5, but that cost will drop over time. GDDR6 allows for minimally 14Gbps per pin throughput on the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, a noteworthy boost over the 8Gbps and 10Gbps throughput on previous generations.
The only problem is that, for Core i5 PC owners at least, the GTX 1080Ti offers a near identical experience for less money. To help answer those questions, I’ve got the Founders Edition of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 (to see what its beefy big brother’s like, have a read of my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti review instead). For those of you who like numbers out there, the next two paragraphs are for you. Like all RTX 2080 cards you’ll be able to buy soon, you’ll find 8GB of GDDR6 memory here that can deliver a massive 448GB/s of memory bandwidth, as well as 2944 CUDA cores and a base clock speed of 1515MHz. Where this card differs from the reference spec is its boost clock speed, which has been raised from 1710MHz to 1800MHz. NVIDIA announced its new Turing video cards for gaming today, including the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070.
It doesn’t reach the heights of the gtx 1090 Ti, but Nvidia’s high-end Turing RTX GPU comes damn close to achieving 4K 60fps gaming for a mildly steep price. 3 – Recommendation is made based on PC configured with an Intel Core i7 3.2 GHz processor.