In brief: Although recent reports suggested Nvidia's upcoming RTX GPUs would struggle to push high framerates in ray-traced titles, new information suggests quite the opposite will be the case for games that don't utilize the technology. Nvidia's RTX 2080 will reportedly be able to double the performance of the GTX 1080 in some titles, while offering a sizable 1.5x FPS increase in most other games.
While the performance of Nvidia's recently-announced RTX 20-series GPUs in ray-traced games is still the topic of much debate, news surrounding their performance potential in standard rasterized titles has hit the web.
Many tech enthusiasts, including our own Steve Walton, expressed concern over the performance Nvidia's new video cards might offer. These fears primarily stemmed from the lack of real benchmarks or performance comparisons shown during the company's pre-Gamescom launch event.
However, thanks to information provided to PCGamesN (much of which is still under embargo from Nvidia), it now seems that Nvidia's RTX cards will offer significant FPS improvements over their predecessors in non-ray-traced titles.
The outlet says the RTX 2080 will offer around 1.5x the FPS you would get with last gen's GTX 1080 on average. Thanks to the device's Turing Tensor Core deep learning technology, it may even be able to push up to 2x the frame rates in some titles.
If this information is accurate, it will represent a massive leap forward in performance, hammering home the point that Nvidia's RTX cards genuinely contain new GPU architecture, and not merely old but refreshed tech.
Perhaps more importantly, it might justify the high price tags currently attached to the cards in the eyes of consumers. The Founder's Edition RTX 2080's $800 sticker price will probably be tough for anybody to swallow, but the $700 an RTX 2080 partner card will cost down the line might just be worth it to many.
As exciting as this news is, it should be noted that Nvidia has not officially confirmed it yet (outside of saying RTX GPUs will offer 60+ FPS at 4K), so it may be best to take it with a grain of salt - for now. Regardless, we look forward to learning more about the performance capabilities of Nvidia's new RTX GPUs in the coming weeks.