The Test

For the launch of the RTX 2080 Super, NVIDIA has rolled out a new set of drivers to enable the card: 431.56. These drivers don’t offer any performance improvements over the 431.15 drivers in our games, so the results are fully comparable.

Meanwhile, I've gone ahead and tossed in the Radeon RX 5700 XT in to our graphs. While it's aimed at a distinctly lower market with its $399 price tag, it has the potential to be a very strong spoiler here, especially for 1440p gaming.

CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz
Motherboard: ASRock Z390 Taichi
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i
Hard Disk: Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38)
Case: NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition
Monitor: Asus PQ321
Video Cards: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
AMD Radeon VII
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64
AMD Radeon R9 390X
Video Drivers: NVIDIA Release 431.15
NVIDIA Release 431.56
AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.1
OS: Windows 10 Pro (1903)
Meet the GeForce RTX 2080 Super Shadow of the Tomb Raider
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  • willis936 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    I think there is an error on the first page comparison table: 2080 Ti memory clock.

    Also first I guess.
  • willis936 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Also the last paragraph of the conclusion should have "barring" rather than "baring".
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    This is what happens when you get overeager with copying & pasting... Thanks!
  • extide - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    and you say ending the bundle when I think you mean extending
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    The fault with that one lies solely with Word!
  • boozed - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    You guys really need a "corrections" link so the comments section isn't full of people pointing out typos and malapropisms (I'm guilty of the latter myself, though).

    Cheers for the review
  • RSAUser - Wednesday, July 24, 2019 - link

    They rather need a grammarly subscription.
  • willis936 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    496 GB/s for $700. I'm curious to see a retrospective of GPU memory bandwidth vs. cost over the last ten years. It feels like it's really sat still compared to transistor count. Are GPU caches getting bigger? Even then there is little that can be done about the main memory bandwidth requirements of SIMD workloads. We have faster interconnects yet the buses are staying the same or getting smaller.
  • Stuka87 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Bandwidth matters less now than it did many years ago thanks different types of compression being used. You can fit more data into the same amount of bandwidth now than you could years ago.
  • willis936 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Lossy compression isn't free. At some point the user will say "this looks bad". If that wasn't the case then why not compress every 64x64 tile to 1 KB? It's dependent on the data's entropy and many textures are high entropy. It's nice to have tuneable control over a soft cap, but it isn't a magic bullet that makes things better.
    Lossless compression would be bad in this application. No one should make a system that imposes a maximum allowed entropy on artists.

    Memory bandwidth always has and remains to be the bottleneck of SIMD systems.

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