WITH NO REAL THREAT from AMD at
the high end, the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti
remain unchallenged. Still, it’s nearly
a year after the launch of the GeForce
RTX cards, and just in time for the back-
to-school season, Nvidia’s new and
improved product is now available. Take
the same TU104 GPU that’s used in the
RTX 2080, enable all of the streaming
multiprocessors and CUDA cores, and
crank the GDDR6 memory clock up from
14Gb/s to 15.5Gb/s. Depending on your
reference point, GPU clocks are either
nearly the same or about 100MHz faster.
In other words, it’s not an incredibly
exciting launch. If you’ve got an RTX 2080,
you can get nearly the same performance
via overclocking. If you’ve been thinking
about buying a $700 graphics card,
though, the RTX 2080 Super now claims
top honors—and there’s no $100 price
premium if you buy direct from Nvidia.
There’s a bit more separation between
the 2080 Super and the 2070 Super,
because only the 2080 Super gets
15.5Gb/s GDDR6. Clock speeds have been
pushed about as far as you’re likely to
see. Sure, you can probably squeeze a
few percent more performance out of
the card via manual overclocking, but it’s
definitely going to be a case of diminishing
returns. The TDP has already jumped
35W compared to the 2080.
In terms of features, nothing has
changed since last year’s GeForce RTXNo Founders Edition premium
makes this a decent $700 card
Nvidia GeForce
RTX 2080 Super
7
VERDICT Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 SuperSUPER DUPER Great for 1440p
and even 4K; still hope for ray
tracing; fastest GDDR6 clocks so far.
PARTY POOPER Only a little faster than
RTX 2080; not at all revolutionary; needs
a killer ray-tracing app.
$700, http://www.nvidia.comSPECIFICATIONSGPU Turing TU104
Lithography TSMC 12nm FinFET
Transistor Count 13.6 billion
CUDA Cores 3,072
Texture Units 192
ROPs 64
Core/Boost Clock 1,650/1,815MHz
Memory Capacity
& Type
8GB GDDR6
Memory Speed 15.5GT/s
Memory Bus 256-bit
TDP 250W
Display Connectors 3x DisplayPort 1.4,
HDMI 2.0B, USB Type-CNvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (Avg fps) 133 / 90 126/86
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Avg fps) 76 / 63 73/62
Far Cry 5 (Avg fps) 131 / 112 131 /108
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Avg fps) 130 / 97 130 /92
Middle Earth: Shadow of War (Avg fps) 129 / 96 120/90
Metro Exodus (Avg fps) 97 / 74 93/71
Total War: Warhammer II (Avg fps) 104 / 94 103/92GPU BENCHMARKSBest scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-8700K, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4-3200, a Gigabyte
Z370 Aorus Gaming 7, and a 1TB Samsung Evo M.2 SSD. All games are tested at their highest graphical profile
with AA turned on, at 1080p and 1440p respectively.launch. At 1440p, for example, the 2080
Super is 5 percent faster than the 2080,
which in turn is 7 percent faster than
the 2070 Super. Other resolutions tell
a similar story, although 1080p starts
becoming CPU-limited at times. The
2080 Super is only 2–3 percent faster on
average than a 2080 at 1080p, while at 4K,
the added memory bandwidth does help
a little bit, and it’s 6 percent faster—11
percent more memory bandwidth is nice,
but not really necessary. Meanwhile,
there’s only 5 percent more compute
performance relative to the 2080, which
is why the gains in performance are
all less than 11 percent, and often less
than 5 percent.VALUE JUDGMENT
The RTX 2080 Super still does great as
a card for gaming at 1440p, averaging
more than 60fps in ever y game we tested.
1080p ultra and 144Hz is also mostly
viable, although you’d want a G-Sync
display. The only problem is that the exact
same thing can be said of the RTX 2080.
If all 2080 cards were still priced at $700
and up, the 2080 Super would be an easy
recommendation. Instead, we have RTX
2080 cards starting at $610, and factory
overclocked models for $650. In terms of
frames per dollar spent, it’s pretty much
a wash.
The only cards that are substantially
faster than the RTX 2080 Super arecurrently priced so high that only the
deepest pockets can reach. The RTX 2080
Ti is about 20 percent faster overall at
4K, but it costs about 50 percent more.
Meanwhile, the Titan RTX is 25 percent
faster overall at 4K, and costs more than
three RTX 2080 Super cards.
We’re still waiting to see a killer app
for Nvidia’s ray-tracing hardware. The
performance hit is far too steep in most
games. Developers need to figure out
a way to significantly boost ray-tracing
performance so that the final results
actually look significantly better while
still delivering acceptable performance.
However, we worry that it won’t be until
the next generation of Nvidia GPUs that
we have the hardware necessary to truly
tackle real-time ray tracing without
compromising performance. Let’s hope
some clever software developers prove
us wrong.
The GeForce RTX 2080 Super ends
up as the typical update to an existing
product. Yes, it’s faster than the previous
iteration, but not markedly so. If you
already have an RTX 2080, you can carry
on without losing any sleep. If you’re
putting together a new PC or upgrading
from an existing GPU, and you want
something more than an RTX 2070 Super,
but can’t step up to the 2080 Ti, this will
have to suffice. –JARRED WALTONmaximumpc.com OCT 2019 MAXIMUMPC 77