NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER Review

Bridging the gap between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 2080 SUPER is NVIDIA’s new high-performance Turing graphics card designed for 1440p/4K gamers.

Product on Review: GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Street Price: USD $699 – AUD $1209 – GBP £669

In a bid to cement their position in the high-performance GPU market, NVIDIA today unveils their third model under the mid-life RTX refresh – the RTX 2080 SUPER. We’ve already seen what the 2060 SUPER and 2070 SUPER are capable of and it was immediately apparent that a shift in performance to the next-tier SKU was the order of the day. So better performance for less money – what’s not to like?

The RTX 2080 SUPER isn’t designed to revolutionise or introduce anything ground-breaking but will continue the trend we’ve seen in the other SUPER siblings. So, we expect this GPU to nestle into position above the RTX 2080 and trail the RTX 2080 Ti.

As it presently stands, the cheapest RTX 2080 Ti sits at 1100 USD – 1799 AUD – £1000 GBP. Will this Founders Edition variant of RTX 2080 SUPER be a worthwhile option for those unable to afford the current GPU king?

NVIDIA on their RTX 2080 SUPER

NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2080 SUPER™ is powered by the award-winning NVIDIA Turing™ architecture with more cores, higher clocks, and faster memory for ultimate performance and incredible new levels of realism. It’s time to gear up and get super powers.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RTX 2080 SUPER Founders Edition supplied by NVIDIA:

SUPER Improvements

Info taken from Tim Harmer’s news story – NVIDIA Refreshes The GeForce RTX 20-series With A SUPER New Lineup

GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER

By stepping down NVIDIA’s lineup just a little we reach the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER. Outwardly this card is another straightforward in-line replacement for its vanilla variant, but there’s quite a lot going on when you look more closely (some of which NVIDIA are strangely reticent to discuss).

The RTX 2070 SUPER is promoted to utilise the TU104 rather than TU106 GPU at the heart of its vanilla series counterpart; quite understandable given the RTX 2070 fully utilised that lesser GPU.

A TU104 is equipped with up to six Graphics Processing Clusters, each with eight Shader Modules. An SM has 64 CUDA Cores alongside other components such as Tensor Cores and RT Cores, so in theory a TU104 could have up to a total of 3072 CUDA Cores enabled. The RTX 2070 SUPER has 2560 enabled (up from 2304 on the RTX 2070) representing a total of 40 SMs of the 64 available. Normally one would assume therefore that the RTX 2070 SUPER has five of the TU104’s six GPCs unlocked.

Strangely however NVIDIA’s technical specifications list the RTX 2070 SUPER as incorporating ‘5 or 6’ GPCs, implying some variance between the configuration of particular RTX 2070 SUPER GPUs. We asked NVIDIA if this implied there would be multiple variants of the RTX 2070 SUPER (perhaps as different SKUs) and this was their response:

“The are no [SKU] variants, it is just a function of how we select the chips. We have done extensive game testing and there is no difference between 5 or 6 GPCs in the results.”

Given the minor kerfuffle caused by the binning process of the RTX 20-series, it will be fascinating to see how this particular incongruity plays out.

Other improvements from the RTX 2070 include higher Base and Boost clocks and a greater number of texture units. Boost Clocks in particular will differ between the Founder’s Edition and partner models due to differences in the power delivery infrastructure and cooler. Overall, NVIDIA expect the RTX 2070 SUPER to be up to 21% faster than the RTX 2070, with an average of 16% better FPS across a wide sample of titles.

GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER

Sitting at a new price point for the RTX 20-series is the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, a $399 MSRP graphics card that bridges the price and performance gap between the RTX 2060 and 2070. Unlike the RTX 2080 & 2070 SUPER cards however it doesn’t displace or make obsolete any particular model; instead it seems tailored to compete with the AMD Radeon RX 5700.

The TU106 once again returns but with more SMs unlocked compared to the RTX 2060. Just as significant is an increase to 8GB of GDDR6 memory which now operates over a 256-bit wide bus, helping the cards capabilities at higher resolutions and image quality settings. Base operating frequencies are higher – now up to 1470MHz – but in an interesting twist Boost Frequencies are a little lower at 1650MHz.

In combination these changes should see the card be far more accomplished at 1440p than its predecessor, and hence be a much more attractive upgrade path for GTX 970/1060 owners than the RTX 2060 turned out to be. If the Boost frequency are in fact relatively modest then it could give NVIDIA’s AIC partners an opportunity to really flex their muscles and push the card to rival the RTX 2070.

Closer Look Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review showing the physical design of this graphics card, highlighting its features and stripping it down by removing the thermal solution. You can watch the video below or click on this link to watch the NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE Video Review.

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2080
ZOTAC NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER Twin Fan
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2070
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2060
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
AMD Radeon Vega 56
AMD Radeon RX 5700
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

Special thanks go to Avermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

ACOUSTICS

Noise emission with NVIDIA’s RTX 20-series cooler has definitely improved compared to previous generations of the FE solution. Noise can still be heard but it isn’t disruptive.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a story-driven open-world RPG that immerses you in an epic adventure in the Holy Roman Empire. Avenge your parents’ death as you battle invading forces, go on game-changing quests, and make influential choices.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

It probably won’t come as a bombshell that the RTX 2080 SUPER slots above the RTX 2080 and below the RTX 2080 Ti. NVIDIA’s SUPER facelift has shifted each SKU up in performance while costing less than their counterpart – allowing NVIDIA to monopolize on better price/performance.

Pitting the RTX 2080 against the SUPER reveals not just a mere bump in GPU clock speed but an assortment of other attributes too. The CUDA cores are up from 2944 to 3072, GPU clock boost is up from 1710MHz to 1815MHz, memory clock is up from 14 Gbps to 15.5 Gbps. In a variety of areas the SUPER has been beefed up – we haven’t mentioned Tensor FLOPS, Texture Units or Cache size – all of which have been modified accordingly to amplify this new SKU.

In outright performance the RTX 2080 SUPER isn’t too far behind the RTX 2080 Ti – making it a good option to go with if the Ti is out of reach but UHD gaming is a necessity. Gaming of course isn’t the only area that such a GPU will excel in, content creation demands a high-performance graphics card and RTX 2080 SUPER will not disappoint.

This mid-life refresh hasn’t altered the thermal design on this Founders Edition version of the 2080 – the twin-fan solution works brilliantly compared to previous iterations of NVIDIA’s own cooler – providing decent temperature figures and, while the cooler may not be as quiet as a custom/partner design, it still emits less noise than predecessor solutions.

Looking at current pricing – the cheapest RTX 2080 Ti is approximately 1100 USD – 1799 AUD – 1000 GBP. While the RTX 2080 SUPER is 699 USD – 1209 AUD – 669 GBP. Clearly, SUPER should be a consideration since it offers better value for money. Once we see partner cards for this new class of GPU with factory overclocks, you can count on the performance gap reducing significantly between the Ti and SUPER.

RTX 2080 SUPER cements NVIDIA’s prowess in the high-performance GPU realm. It is cheaper than what the RTX 2080 was and trails closely behind RTX 2080 Ti.

Pros
+ Appealing design
+ Includes wrap-around backplate
+ Cheaper than RTX 2080
+ Low-noise fans
+ Offers great performance
+ Overclocks reasonably well

Cons
– No idle fan stop
– High power consumption

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