BY CHRISTIAN GUYTONThe last hurrah in our series of GPU head to heads, this month we’re looking at the high-end
cards. We’re talking 4K, baby! The focus is primarily on 4K gaming, although other elements
are taken into account as well. In the red corner, we have AMD’s top offering, the Radeon VII,
poster boy for the 7nm GPU architecture. Meanwhile, Nvidia sits opposite with the recently
released GeForce RTX 2080 Super and the older but stronger RTX 2080 Ti. There are pros
and cons to purchasing any of these cards, but which one is the best? Let’s dive straight in.Radeon VII vs. RTX 2080 Super
vs. RTX 2080 Ti
Value
There’s a clear winner in this round:
the RTX 2080 Super. That’s right,
we just spoilered the ending to this
round in the first sentence. Hope
you’ve already seen Endgame. In all
seriousness, though, the 2080 Super
is the newest card here, and its status
as a price-matched refresh of the
original RTX 2080 makes it excellent
value. Without costing a penny more,
Nvidia improved the performance
against the original model by 5–
percent, and the 2080 was no slouch
in that area to begin with.
Objectively speaking, none of these
cards is particularly good value for
money, especially considering that
they demand a 4K monitor, too. When
examining GPUs on an fps-per-dollar
basis, the champions are always
cheaper cards, such as the RX 580 and
GTX 1660. The Radeon VII might be
the cheapest of the three cards we’re
looking at here, but it only costs 20–
50 dollars less than the 2080 Super
(depending on the manufacturer)
and can’t come close to matching its
performance. Meanwhile, the 2080 Ti
is, unsurprisingly, the most powerful
card on show here, but a four-figure
price tag can’t be justified by 10 extra
frames per second when compared to
the 2080 Super.Winner: RTX 2080 SuperOverclocking
Taking a look at the base and boost
clocks available for these cards, the
RTX 2080 Ti is very much starting to
show its age. The reported boost clock
on the Founder’s Edition is a mere
1,635MHz, lower than the 2080 Super’s
base clock of 1,650MHz. The 2080 Ti
has pretty good headroom for manual
overclocking, but the speed still isn’t
going to get as high as the Super, which
can comfortably eke out an additional
5–10 percent of memory speed in the
hands of a skilled overclocker.
The Radeon VII is a bit of a slouch
here. While the boost clock of 1,750MHz
is respectable, squeezing more than
5 percent of improved performance
from this card is a struggle. The high
temperature limits on this card do help
a bit, but unfortunately the limits of the
current 7nm FinFET architecture are
plain to see. The 2080 Super is easily
capable of breaching 2,000MHz when
overclocked, which can partially make
up for the lower baseline performance
when compared to the 2080 Ti. It’s not
going to reach the same heights as
the more expensive card, but it’s got
just as much headroom for manual
overclocking, if not more, and also has a
greater improvement between base and
boost clocks: an increase of 165MHz as
opposed to the 2080 Ti’s 120MHz.Winner: RTX 2080 SuperEfficiency
The Radeon VII is, unfortunately, quite
a poor card when it comes to efficiency,
being the first 7nm GPU available
commercially—the kinks with 7nm still
haven’t quite been ironed out. It does
have a relatively high temperature
limit (it won’t force a shutdown
until it hits a whopping 120 C), and it
performs fairly well undervolted, but
that comes with a comparable drop in
performance. The base power draw is
a crippling 300W; unsurprising given
this card’s ridiculous amount of VRAM
and crazy-fast memory speed—more
on that later.
The 2080 Ti is a demanding card,
but it comes with the same TDP as
the 2080 Super: 250W. The Super
card clocks higher, but the Ti packs
more VRAM, better bandwidth, more
transistors, more CUDA cores.... It
simply has superior architecture. The
Turing TU104 architecture used by the
RTX 2080 evolved to its perfect form
in the Super GPU, but the 2080 Ti’s
TU102 design is just more advanced.
While practical power use and noise
are variable with any GPU (particularly
if you’re overclocking), the same
base power draw for your system
means that the 2080 Ti is—perhaps
surprisingly—the most efficient card
of the three.Winner: RTX 2080 TiROUND 1 ROUND 2 ROUND 3
quickstart
20 MAXIMUMPC DEC 2019 maximumpc.com