An Interlude for GeForce RTX 2080 Super
We have GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 Super in the lab right now. Both cards should be available to purchase on July 9th. Two weeks later, on July 23rd, Nvidia will start selling the GeForce RTX 2080 Super, based on a pristine, uncut TU104 GPU.
To ensure an ample supply of complex TU104 GPUs, Nvidia disabled one of the chip's TPCs to create its original GeForce RTX 2080. There wasn’t much else it could do for 2080 Super then, except to activate that missing TPC. The result is 3,072 CUDA cores, 384 Tensor cores, 48 RT cores, 192 texture units, and 24 PolyMorph engines. Base and GPU Boost clock rates rise to 1,650 and 1,815 MHz, respectively, yielding five percent-higher peak FP32 compute performance.
Nvidia is also using faster GDDR6 memory. Its official specifications cite a 15.5 Gbps data rate, which corresponds to 496 GBps of bandwidth on TU104’s 256-bit aggregate bus. But if the 2080 Super employs Micron’s MT61K256M32JE-16 modules to get there, we may see some overclocking headroom to break 500 GBps.
The 2080 Super’s power consumption rises to 250W, up from the vanilla 2080’s 225W. It still gets by with one eight- and one six-pin power connector, though.
How We Tested GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super
Nvidia shipped us GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super as we were preparing for our Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT reviews. As a result, all four cards are tested on a brand-new platform powered by Intel’s Core i7-8086K six-core CPU on a Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming motherboard with 64GB of a Corsair CMK128GX4M8A2400OC14 kit. We’re still using a couple of 500GB Crucial MX200 SSDs for our gaming suite, along with Noctua’s NH-D15S heat sink/fan combo.
Of course, this required building a new library of data with a limited amount of time to do it. We’re starting with a selection of cards relevant to the new GeForces. From Nvidia, that includes GeForce RTX 2080, GeForce RTX 2070, GeForce RTX 2060, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, and GeForce GTX 1070. All of those cards are represented by Nvidia’s own Founders Edition models except for the 1070 Ti, which is an MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G. AMD’s own Radeon VII is part of the comparison as well, along with Sapphire’s Nitro+ Radeon RX Vega 64 and Nitro+ Radeon RX Vega 56. Those partner cards ensure we don’t see the frequency/throttling issues encountered with our reference models.
Our benchmark selection includes Battlefield V, Destiny 2, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XV, Forza Horizon 4, Grand Theft Auto V, Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Strange Brigade, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Witcher 3 and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
The testing methodology we're using comes from PresentMon: Performance In DirectX, OpenGL, And Vulkan. In short, these games are evaluated using a combination of OCAT and our own in-house GUI for PresentMon, with logging via GPU-Z.
We’re using driver build 431.16 for Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 Super and build 430.86 for all of the other Nvidia cards. On AMD’s side, we’re using Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.6.3 for all three cards.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content