Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Faster, More Expensive Than GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

By Igor Wallossek, Chris Angelini
published

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Results: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, The Witcher 3, and WoW

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (DX11)

The only reason we use Ghost Recon’s Very High detail setting is to avoid the Ultra preset’s Turf Effects option, which creates an unfair comparison between GeForce and Radeon cards.

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Clearly, the GeForce RTX 2080 has performance to spare if you’d like to crank graphics quality up even higher, though. It’s only a bummer that a 4% lead over GeForce GTX 1080 Ti isn’t particularly inspiring.

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An average of 54.1 FPS falls just short of what we’d consider a smooth experience at 4K with quality settings cranked up. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti forces a similar admission. You can splurge on GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for the ultimate experience at 3840x2160, drop to 2560x1440 and maintain the gorgeous-looking visuals, or dial back the quality settings to get a better frame rate at 4K. It’s a tough balancing act, to be sure.

The Witcher 3 (DX11)

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You don’t need a GeForce RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti to enjoy The Witcher 3 at 2560x1440 using the game’s Ultra quality preset. We’d be perfectly happy with a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti for $400 in an older DirectX 11 title like this one.

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Never mind the fact that The Witcher 3 is more than three years old; it remains one of the most picturesque games in our suite. Up until now, we considered the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti’s 66 FPS smooth enough for an enjoyable experience. But this is one of the few scenarios where dropping the extra $100 on GeForce RTX 2080 pays off.

Bonus: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth (DX12)

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WoW is another game that’d likely benefit more from a CPU upgrade than an $800 graphics card. However, since Battle for Azeroth added DirectX 12 support to its custom engine, we decided it’d be fun to test the game using its most taxing detail settings with 4x MSAA enabled.

If you’re already using a high-end Pascal-based graphics card, Blizzard’s latest expansion doesn’t get much faster from Turing at this resolution. Just the fact that GeForce RTX 2080 lands on top is enough to demonstrate a severe platform bottleneck.

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Switching to 4K and disabling MSAA has little effect on the top five finishers. GeForce RTX 2080 appears to match Titan V, beating GeForce GTX 1080 Ti by almost 4%.

Igor Wallossek
91 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wh3resmycar
    failure, this is a failure.

    this gtx20 series looks like it won't be worth it.
    Reply
  • velocityg4
    What? No “just buy it” in your conclusion.

    Considering Founders edition usually starts about $100 more that standard edition. Plus, it is new to market. If a 2080 can be had for $100 more than a 1080 Ti. The price is as expected.
    Reply
  • tojumikie
    another price-panicked pundit
    Reply
  • Krazie_Ivan
    2080 should have been the 2070, as it barely beats a 1080ti and is the TU104 die. and given the 30mo since Pascal launch, we should almost be looking at 3000 series benches. combine those two with the insane pricing, and Turing/RTX is a huge disappointment. DLSS could be nice and i'm glad Nvidia is pushing for RT development, but there's not enough positives here to justify the costs. $380 2080 / $500 2080ti (and relabel them to match their die codes, like Keplar-Pascal)... otherwise, no thx.
    Reply
  • chaosmassive
    thank you for your thorough review on these cards,
    finally the card has been demystified and indeed for the price is it not worth the buy considering 1080 ti in such a low price..

    turned out I dont need ray tracing in my life before I die.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    After seeing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti serve up respectable performance in Battlefield V at 1920x1080 with ray tracing enabled,
    Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for another day to measure RTX 2080’s alacrity in ray-traced games. There simply aren’t any available yet.

    Odd... either ray tracing graphics games are available or they're not. You can't test what isn't available for testing... and RT for BF5, last I heard was a zero-day patch... (or was it the modifications to RT that was supposed to improve FPS to acceptable levels.)
    Reply
  • cangelini
    21333311 said:
    After seeing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti serve up respectable performance in Battlefield V at 1920x1080 with ray tracing enabled,
    Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for another day to measure RTX 2080’s alacrity in ray-traced games. There simply aren’t any available yet.

    Odd... either ray tracing graphics games are available or they're not. You can't test what isn't available for testing... and RT for BF5, last I heard was a zero-day patch... (or was it the modifications to RT that was supposed to improve FPS to acceptable levels.)

    They're not available, but we've seen Battlefield 5 in action with ray tracing enabled ;)
    Reply
  • WINTERLORD
    wait a minute the 2080 has only one RT core and the 2080 has 72 RT cores? I think there may be an error in the review. update spoke to soon i think that means 1rt cluster...

    first page says " TU104 is constructed with the same building blocks as TU102; it just features fewer of them. Streaming Multiprocessors still sport 64 CUDA cores, eight Tensor cores, one RT core, four texture units, 16 load/store units, 256KB of register space, and 96KB of L1 cache/shared memory. "
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    21333069 said:
    failure, this is a failure.

    this gtx20 series looks like it won't be worth it.

    I think sales will determine that and if history is anything without stiff competition from AMD I am sure they will sell just fine especially once the AiB cards come out.

    21333082 said:
    What? No “just buy it” in your conclusion.

    Considering Founders edition usually starts about $100 more that standard edition. Plus, it is new to market. If a 2080 can be had for $100 more than a 1080 Ti. The price is as expected.

    Chris has never been like that.

    That said, the pricing should be decent for AiB after a few months. When they launch they get price gouged. Still I would have loved a GTX 1080 price number. That GPU outperformed the 980 Ti by a good margin and was cheaper at launch.

    Maybe AMD will come out with something sometime soon. Otherwise we wont see pricing drop. That or AMD will take advantage of the pricing increase and up theirs too.
    Reply
  • hixbot
    Such a shame 2.5 years after pascal launches, performance per dollar does not improve.
    Reply