The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti & RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Foundations For A Ray Traced Future
by Nate Oh on September 19, 2018 5:15 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Raytrace
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- DirectX Raytracing
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)
Now a truly venerable title, GTA V is a veteran of past game suites that is still graphically demanding as they come. As an older DX11 title, it provides a glimpse into the graphically intensive games of yesteryear that don't incorporate the latest features. Originally released for consoles in 2013, the PC port came with a slew of graphical enhancements and options. Just as importantly, GTA V includes a rather intensive and informative built-in benchmark, somewhat uncommon in open-world games.
The settings are identical to its previous appearances, which are custom as GTA V does not have presets. To recap, a "Very High" quality is used, where all primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, except grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced rendering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
| GTA V | 1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 99th Percentile |  |
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There was an interesting issue during testing that affected the RTX cards at 4K; running the benchmark would result in a blank screen for the entirety of the run. The image would appear with Alt+Enter to put it in windowed mode, but disappear again back in fullscreen. An external overlay resolved the issue, but performance results were identical either way. We really didn't have time to investigate thoroughly, but GTA V, especially with Social Club, can be quite finicky and I hesitate to call it a driver bug without digging into it more.
It's a testament to both GTA V and the nature of graphics optimization work that a GeForce card can only now average 60fps. Even still, it's restricted to the RTX 2080 Ti performance tier, which is roughly where the Titan V stands as well. Regardless, the results represent the performance scenario that NVIDIA is ultimately hoping to avoid: the 1080 Ti exceeding the 2080 in performance even with the Founders Edition tweaks. At this point, the 1080 Ti is a mature card and the offerings will skew towards tried-and-true halo custom cards, factory overclocked and well-cooled. Plain performance regression in reference settings is not something the RTX 2080 can easily afford with the higher price - Founders Edition or otherwise.
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ESR323 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
I agree with the conclusion that these cards aren't a good buy for 1080ti owners. My 1080ti overclocks very nicely and I'll be happy to stick with it until the next generation in 7 nm. By then we might have a decent selection of games that make use of ray tracing and the performance increase will be more appealing.imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
Yah i agree, especially its only a 20-25fps increase on average. While many might thing thats great, considering the price increase over 1080TI and the fact many 1080TI can overclock to close that gap even more. The features don't justify the cost.However, it could be lots of performance could be unlocked via driver updates..we really don't know how tensor cores could increase performance till the games get updated to use it. Also, while super expensive option...how does the new SLI performance increase performance? Lets see a compare from 1080TI sli to newer sli 2080TI..maybe its easier to put into games? So many what-ifs with this product.
I feel this product should of been delayed till more games/software already had feature sets available to see.
Aybi - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
There wont be driver&optimization support for 1000 series. They will focus on 2000 series and with that the gap going to increase a lot.If you remember 980ti and 1080ti it was the same case when 1080ti announced and then you know what happened.
Vayra - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Actually I don't and there is also no data to back up what you're saying. The 980ti still competes with the 1070 as it did at Pascal launch.Don't spread BS
Matthmaroo - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Dude that’s not true at allNvidia will fully support the 10 series for the next 5 -10 years
They all use the same CUDA cores
Don’t just make crap up to justify your purchase
SanX - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
What the useless job the reviewer is doing comparing only to latest generstion cards? Add at least 980Ti and 780TiMrSpadge - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Ever heard of their benchmark database?Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
You'll be glad to hear then that we'll be backfilling cards.There was a very limited amount of time ahead of this review, and we thought it to be more important to focus on things like clocking the cards at their actual reference clocks (rather than NVIDIA's factory overclocks).
dad_at - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Many thanks for that, I think it is useful job, people are still using maxwell(or even older) generation GPU in 2018. And when we could expect maxwell (980/980ti) results to appear in GPU 2018 bench? Could you also please add Geforce GTX Titan X (maxwell) to GPU 2018?StevoLincolnite - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Hopefully you back-fill a substantial amount, the GPU bench this year has been a bit lacking... Especially in regards to mid-range and older parts.Whole point of it is so that you can see how the latest and greatest compare it to your old and crusty.