Review
Here, Noctis and pals could romp around the plains of Duscae at 55-60fps on the GTX 1080Ti with all of Nvidia’s super graphics switched on at Highest, but the RTX 2080 could only match that speed when I disabled the intensive VXAO option. At 4K, the GTX 1080Ti managed a steady 45-47fps on Highest with all of Nvidia’s fancy graphics effects turned off, whereas the RTX 2080 could only get between 40-43fps on the same settings. Elsewhere, however, the two cards were pretty much neck-and-neck at both 4K and 1440p. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for example, the RTX 2080 managed a very respectable 52fps average on Ultra High at 4K in its internal benchmark, but the GTX 1080Ti was right alongside it with its average of 51fps. What’s more, the GTX 1080Ti actually pulled ahead at 1440p, reaching an average of 79fps on Ultra High compared with the RTX’s 71fps. Still, I can only work with what I’ve got, and really, I would have hoped a top of the line Core i5 would have proved a decent enough partner for it.
To measure GPU memory usage during benchmarking, I used the hardware monitor in EVGA’s Precision X1 utility. What is interesting to see is how performance increases when OptiX is enabled, and the software can offload ray tracing calculations to the RT cores of the RTX cards. In Redshift, the impact is relatively small – although bear in mind that version 3.0 is still in early access – but in the V-Ray benchmark, performance increases by 33-35%, and in the Blender benchmark, by %. In the viewport and editing benchmarks, the frame rate scores represent the figures attained when manipulating the 3D assets shown, averaged over five testing sessions to eliminate inconsistencies.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, the performance metrics don’t stop at the 1080 Ti. The GeForce is just stunning amounts of performance for gamers for a really unbeatable price point considering where we were with the last generation of GPUs. New Turing shader architecture with Variable Rate Shading allows shaders to focus processing power on areas of rich detail, boosting overall performance. Test scores and system configurations are below, and we’ll update these with new gaming laptops as we test them.
In all of the rendering benchmarks, the CPU was disabled, so only the GPU was used for computing. Testing was performed on a single 32” 4K display, running its native resolution of 3,840 x 2,160px at 60Hz. Jason Lewis assesses how Nvidia’s current top-of-the-range gaming GPU compares to the firm’s other GeForce and Titan RTX graphics cards in a punishing series of real-world 3D and GPU rendering tests. The RTX 2080 Super is by no means a bad GPU or a terrible deal, but the performance bump compared to the RTX 2080 ranges from mild to non-existent in some games. Thank goodness Nvidia didn’t raise the price otherwise this would be a bad launch for team green. Overall it’s still a great GPU though, in that it’s very powerful and runs silent and cool.
Coupled with a very smooth power delivery system to avoid leakage, the chip is one of the most efficient GPU architecture ever designed for gamers. The display outputs for the card include 3 Display Port 1.4 (4K @ 120 Hz), 1 HDMI 2.0b (4K @ 60 Hz) and USB Type-C connector for the Virtual link which means that it is capable to support all next-gen displays with new standards. To be honest, playing $2,300 for the lowest-end new GPU in the family stings a bit, and the performance scores show just how much there is to gain with the higher-end 2080 GPUs. It’s otherwise one of my favorite gaming laptops, especially in the alternate white version we have here.
The GeForce 20 series was launched with GDDR6 memory chips from Micron Technology. However, due to reported faults with launch models, Nvidia switched to using GDDR6 memory chips from Samsung Electronics by November 2018. Released in late 2018, the RTX 2080 was marketed as up to 75% faster than the GTX 1080 in various games, also describing the chip as “the most significant generational upgrade to its GPUs since the first CUDA cores in 2006,” according to PC Gamer. We’d personally go for the Nvidia RTX 2080 as its still hitting that sweet spot of performance to price, even if you have to save up a little more or swallow an extra credit card payment to pay it off.
The RTX 2080 Ti is untouched, for now, and remains at the top of Nvidia’s product stack at $1,200 with the 2080 Super slotting in below it for $500 less. Despite matching the previous flagship in performance – a card that saw my test system draw around 403W under load, the RTX 3070 managed the same performance at just 343W. This makes it the ideal partner for small form factor systems too, where undervolting might yield far lower power draw and temperatures than the RTX 2080 Ti. Meanwhile, DLSS is artificial intelligence that actively adjusts the resolution in a game to maximize frame rates in areas where resolution isn’t as important and to maximize resolution when the scene calls for it. For example, if you’re sprinting in a first-person shooter, you don’t need high resolution for a hazy scene, but if you’re stopped in the middle of a vibrant forest, the higher resolution will be utilized.
In the V-Ray trolls scene, the Titan RTX – in which the entire scene fits into on-board memory – performs much better than the GeForce gtx 1090 Ti, while the GeForce RTX 2080 won’t render the scene at all. Neither the 2080 nor the 2080 Ti will render the other two scenes, crashing every time in the V-Ray architectural scene, and quitting with out-of-memory errors in the Arnold for Maya scene. The viewport benchmarks include many of the key DCC applications – both general-purpose 3D software like 3ds Max, Blender and Maya, and more specialist tools like Substance Painter – plus CAD package SolidWorks and game engine Unreal Engine. If you discount the Titan RTX, which occupies a halfway house between traditional gaming and workstation cards, it’s Nvidia’s current top-of-the-range consumer GPU.