Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
The new king of the hill, with a princely price
THE MARCH OF PROGRESS usually has a stately pace, but sometimes you need to throw caution to the wind, stomp on the accelerator, and see just how fast you can go. That seems to be what Nvidia is doing with its Turing architecture, and it’s what it hopes gamers will do with their wallets.
The RTX 2080 Ti gets you the full kitchen-sink experience. It boasts 21 percent more CUDA cores than the 1080 Ti, and with RT cores and Tensor cores to help accelerate ray tracing and deeplearning calculations, Turing is built for the future. Nvidia is hyping up the raytracing angle, but the deep-learning elements may prove more useful in the long run. The great thing is that you get both. Unlike the RTX 2080, the 2080 Ti doesn’t trade blows with the 1080 Ti. It wins every comparison, and makes 4K gaming at maximum quality viable. It even beats the Titan V in gaming performance.
But there’s a price to pay, literally. The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition costs as much as the Titan Xp, a card that was never about value. For a non-Titan graphics card that’s ostensibly for the consumer market, and not counting dualGPU solutions, RTX 2080 Ti is Nvidia’s most expensive GPU by a long shot. Even the base price of $999 for reference model cards is hard to justify. If you’re an enthusiast, though, you’ll still want one.
At 1440p, the 2080 Ti is over 25 percent faster than the 1080 Ti on average, and nearly 35 percent faster at 4K. That’s with existing games that don’t even use the RT cores or DLSS. There are other features in the Turing architecture, such as mesh shaders, variable rate shaders, multi-view rendering, and texture space shading. As games begin leveraging the new hardware and its features, don’t be surprised if the 2080 Ti extends its lead.
And there’s the rub. We’ve seen plenty of great graphics ideas and demos in the past that never got much traction. There are 11 announced games that plan to support ray tracing, and 25 that will use DLSS, but none is available yet—at least, the DLSS and ray-tracing patches aren’t available. Buying the 2080 Ti for potential future gains involves risk. And with TSMC already doing volume shipments of its new 7nm process (used in the Apple A12 SoC in the iPhone XS), we might see a die shrink of Turing next year that will make the current version look tame.
A big part of why Nvidia can take such a risk with Turing, delivering only modest
increases in graphics performance, but adding lots of costly new features, is because AMD’s GPU division hasn’t provided any serious competition in the past few years. AMD has nothing that can compete with the 1080 Ti in performance, never mind the 2080 Ti. A third refresh of the Polaris architecture is incoming, aiming at the larger $200 graphics card market, but where’s the glory in building a competitive and value-focused sedan?
Nvidia remains the only game in town if you’re after a hot-rod graphics card, with the RTX 2080 Ti as the standard bearer. A future RTX Titan may be waiting in the wings—because even the 2080 Ti doesn’t enable the full TU102 chip— but we don’t even want to think about what it will cost. The RTX 2080 Ti is here right now, delivering uncompromising performance. If you’re thinking about investing in a 4K 144Hz HDR G-Sync monitor, this is the card for you. People may complain about the price, but secretly they wish they could justify the purchase.