NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 & 2080 TI TESTED
ARE THE GPU KING'S SPEEDY NEW CARDS WORTH THE COIN?
Here we go! The biggest PC component launch of the year is upon us. The reveal of a new graphics architecture is always exciting and this one represents one of the biggest ground-up overhauls in recent memory. Nvidia’s Pascal cards have long been excellent, but gamers have been itching to get their hands on a new generation for a long time. That time is now.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX series is initially represented by the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. New GPUs tend be chock full of new technologies, but this one is something different. Nvidia’s synonymous GTX branding goes all the way back to 2005, so the change to RTX branding is something of a seismic shift from the green team. The Turing GPUs at the heart of the RTX series of cards introduce some revolutionary new technologies that aim to raise the bar for graphical fidelity. There’s been a lot of hype ever since the global reveal at Gamescom, and let’s be honest, expectations about how these technologies will perform in the real world are very high. The hype is strong.
BIG & VERY NEW
The RTX 2080 Ti is an absolute monster. Its TU102 core is a MASSIVE 754 square mm chip packing 18.6 billion transistors. It’s fabricated using TSMC’s 12nm FinFET manufacturing process. The RTX 2080 makes use of the smaller TU104 GPU, but it’s still an exceptionally large 545 square mm chip. These are big, powerful and very complicated GPUs.
As the RTX branding itself suggests, Nvidia is betting big on ray tracing, believing it to be the future of PC gaming graphics. To this end it has included what are known as RT cores to Turing GPUs. Fully ray traced games are still a long way off but thanks to these new technologies which make use of the DXR extensions of DirectX 12, hybrid ray tracing is a reality. Traditional rasterizing is here to stay for some time, however, developers can apply real-time ray traced environmental effects like reflections and refractions of light onto and around objects. This has traditionally been very difficult to achieve. Think of the way real world flames produce shadows that bounce around off of objects, casting variable light around a room. These are the kinds of ultrarealistic effects we can expect to see as more games include support.
Seeing these effects in action is spectacular. One of several upcoming games with ray tracing support is Shadow of the Tomb Raider which really does raise the bar for visual fidelity. Nvidia also showed off a ray traced demo of Captain Phasma from Star Wars. Her mirror like armour is rendered in such a way as to be
virtually indistinguishable from the movie itself. And it’s all rendered in real time. We look forward to the implementations of hybrid ray tracing in the likes of Battlefield V and Metro Exodus to see just how these effect look under real gameplay conditions.
DEEP LEARNING & AI
For some time, our readers would have been aware of just how serious Nvidia is about deep learning and AI. The company has incorporated some of this know how into the RTX series, notably with DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling. DLSS is a super-sampling AA algorithm that utilizes the built in tensor cores. DLSS essentially examines the content of a rendered scene and intelligently combines details from multiple frames in order to produce the final image. The end result is a higher quality AA that that’s frees up the burden that traditional AA algorithms place on the rendering pipeline.
The Tensor cores have some exciting possible use cases. They possess tremendous amounts of computational power for AI and deep learning that could be leveraged for use with things like intelligent enemies. How about a boss that learns every time you fight it? There are all sorts of possible applications. Nvidia mentions things like cheat detection and voice recognition among lots of other potential use cases. We’re excited to see just how developers can make use of this power without impacting the traditional rendering pipeline.
NEW FEATURES & STANDARDS
The 2080 and 2080 Ti are the first consumer graphics cards to make use of GDDR6 memory. This brand new generation memory delivers 14 Gbps signalling rates and 20% better power efficiency meaning it’s both faster and uses less power than the GDDR5X memory used in Pascal GPUs.
In addition to the latest Display Port 1.4a and HDMI 2.0b standards, Turing adds support for VirtualLink. VirtualLink uses the USB Type-C connector to deliver the power, display, and data to VR-Headsets over single cable. No more cable spaghetti when enjoying increasingly prevalent VR content.
HDR is trending big in the PC gaming space. RTX series cards add HDR processing natively in the display pipeline. We tested the new HDR features with the gorgeous Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ. Gaming is simply amazing with a G-Sync HDR monitor like this. As if that’s not enough of a monitor for you, Turing adds support for 8K 60Hz in HDR. Wow. Video capabilities are important for many users. Turing GPUs come with an enhanced NVENC encoder which adds support for H.265 (HEVC) 8K encoding at 30 fps. The latest HEVC 10/12b and VP9 10/12b are supported with HDR at up to 8K.
SLI has been relegated to niche status at best, so it’s somewhat of a surprise to see Nvidia resurrect SLI with the introduction of NVLink. On the GTX 2080 Ti, This interconnect is capable of up to 100 GB/s between cards, so if you’re looking to go to 120Hz+ at 4K, NVLink will enable significant multi-GPU improvements.
The world of PC graphics is changing. While the RTX series’ main focus is still to crank out high frame rates so gamers can enjoy a favourite pastime, the technology under the hood is quite incredible.
The holy grail of graphics rendering: Real time ray traced ultra-realistic gaming just got a big step closer. Read on as we take a closer look at the RTX 2080 and 2080 TI Founders Edition cards.
After all, all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if they aren’t fast!