AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 55Theft Auto V ($30 on Humble at
go.pcworld.com/gta5) with all
options turned to Very High, all
Advanced Graphics options except
extended shadows enabled, and
FXAA. GTA V runs on the RAGE
engine and has received substantial
updates since its initial launch.
Once again, the Super duo takes
on all comers, and that goes doubly
so for similarly priced competition. If
you play at 1080p resolution,
however, all of these cards deliver a
comparable gaming experience
because GTA V stalls out just north of
100 fps in our current high-end
testing setup.
SHADOW OF THE TOMB
RAIDER RAY-TRACING
PERFORMANCE
Nvidia crammed more dedicated real-time
ray-tracing hardware into the Super GPUs, so
we wanted to put that to the test, too.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider supports
ray-traced shadows, and it doesn’t insta-
murder your frame rate, especially when
paired with Nvidia’s Deep-Learning Super
Sampling (DLSS) technology. DLSS uses the
dedicated tensor cores in RTX GPUs to use AI
to perform supersampling with a lower
performance hit, reclaiming some of the
frame rate lost by enabling real-time ray
tracing. If you want to know more nitty-gritty
details, be sure to check out our deep-dive
into the Nvidia Turing GPU architecture (go.
pcworld.com/trdp). It’s fascinating stuff.
We tested ray-tracing performance with
RTX Shadows set to both Medium and Ultra
settings, and DLSS on and off for each, using
the game’s built-in benchmark. Resolution
was set to 2560 x 1440 for all runs. Radeon
cards lack dedicated ray-tracing hardware
and cannot enable these options, so we
didn’t benchmark any of AMD’s offerings.
If you’re interested in ray tracing, you’ll
definitely want to invest in the Super versions
of these cards.
Of particular note: Though real-time ray
tracing sometimes gets slammed byShadow of the Tomb Raider
(Frames per second)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE3543534147607388708050617558684455665359RTX Ultra/DLSS
RTX Med/DLSSRTX Ultra
RTX MedNvidia GeForce RTX 2060 (FE)Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (FE)Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (FE)Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super (FE)Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super (FE)