Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080

The Nvidia RTX 2080 represents a new dawn in graphics architecture, but without its headline-grabbing ray tracing and AI-based features it’s a very expensive traditional GPU which struggles to justify its high price. Though we may not have to wait too long for that to change...

NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 is a huge leap over the GTX 1080 in terms of raw performance. And, while we’re intrigued by NVIDIA’s ray tracing and AI rendering technology, it’s too early to tell how useful they’ll be.

The RTX 2080 general performance is impressive, and the jump from the GTX 1080 is noticeable and worth the investment, especially for demanding games.

Nvidia has created the hardware solution, and now it's up to the software to catch up. But in the here and now, the RTX 2080 carries a high price and lacks the raw performance to back it up. It's not a revolution, at least not yet, but for those that believe in a ray traced future, go ahead and bump the score up by 10 points.

For example, we saw significant performance improvements from the GTX 980 Ti to the GTX 1080 Ti (to the tune of 30% or more) with the price going up a mere $50. In this case, we see overall performance gains (without RT or DLSS) sit in the 20% range. However, the price has increased $300 or almost 40% without the performance metrics in ALL TITLES to back it up.

That brings us on to the RTX 2080. Understanding that it's around 25 per cent dearer than the GTX 1080 Ti - £750 vs. £600 - and, on average, only a few per cent faster at 4K in most of the games we tested, puts it in a sticky situation if you only think about present-day games. A more elegant design cannot mask that observation, and considered from a rasterisation point of view, RTX 2080 has about the same horsepower as the GTX 1080 Ti.

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition is a bit faster than the existing GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but at a $100-higher price. As the Turing architecture’s RT and Tensor cores are utilized by game developers, the RTX 2080 is expected to perform even better. For now, though, gamers with high-end graphics in their existing PCs will find this more of a side-grade than an upgrade.

The GeForce RTX 2080's performance, whether considering the NVIDIA-built Founder's Edition or customized EVGA and MSI cards we also featured, is a little more difficult to summarize. The GeForce RTX 2080 clearly outpaces the GeForce GTX 1080 by a wide...