MARCH 2021 PCWorld 47Tracing Benchmark. As you can guess from
its name, it’s a benchmark (and game too)
that uses pretty much Nvidia’s whole bag of
tricks: ray-tracing caustics, reflection,
refraction, ambient occlusion, shadows, and
DLSS 2.1. We ran it on its highest setting with
DLSS on.
We suspect this won’t be running on
AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 (go.pcworld.com/
rx60) anytime soon. We can say the RTX 3080
shows a little pep in outpacing the RTX 2080
Super by 38 percent.
Our last game is Quake II RTX, a fully
path-traced game that brings new life to a
classic. We run it at 19x10 with global
illumination and set to “prefer Nvidia
extensions” rather than Vulkan for the ray
tracing. The result puts the 3080 laptop
about 30 percent ahead of the 2080 Super—
not too shabby.
Given the CPU-limited performance of
laptops, it’s generally going to be pretty
difficult to extract the performance out of the
RTX 3080—even if differs greatly from the
desktop counterpart.
For example, drawing on scores from the
laptops we’ve tested in-house, the RTX 3080
mobile stacks up very well indeed. Two
laptops are still faster than it—the original
Alienware Area 51M with a desktop CPU and
GeForce RTX 2080 (non–Max-Q version), and
the Acer Predator Helios 700, which isBright Memory
Infinite 19x10
Frames per second
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H
Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE45
62Shadow of the
Tomb Raider
Very High DXR 19x10
Frames per second
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H
Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE63
80Metro Exodus
RTX Ultra 19x10
Frames per second
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H
Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE47.88
57.66Quake II RTX 1.4 19x10
Global Illumination On
Frames per second
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H
Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE64
83.1