MSI RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO Review

Is this the fastest NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti graphics card on the market? MSI are back with their renowned GAMING X TRIO with TRI-FROZR cooler and factory overclock.

Product on Review: RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO
Manufacturer & Sponsor: MSI
Street Price: UK £1199 US $1200 AUS $2099

The GAMING X TRIO was first introduced under the NVIDIA GTX 10-series and this class of GPU represents the bleeding edge of what MSI has to offer. Think of it as their flagship classification. This series debut arrived at the tail-end of last year, when the GTX 1080 Ti had already been on the market for a good eight months, but with the new RTX 20-series, MSI have their GAMING X TRIO locked and loaded from the very start and are straight out of the gate.

The RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO is armed with MSI’s TRI-FROZR cooling solution which consists of three cooling fans, twin heatsinks and seven copper heatpipes. Along with this monolithic cooler, we also benefit from a factory overclock to the GPU boost clock and RGB LED lighting by way of Mystic Light.

The GAMING X TRIO is among the fastest RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards on the market, but can it rise to the top of the leaderboard?

MSI on their GAMING X TRIO

The GeForce RTX 20 Series GAMING TRIO is the return of MSI’s mighty three-fan graphics card. Only reserved for the most powerful of GPU’s, the TRIO Series features a mix of black and gunmetal grey with elegant shapes and a classy brushed metal backplate that matches the front. This looks great with the gorgeous RGB effects found on the front and the side of the card, which can be controlled using MSI’s Mystic Light software and made to synchronize with other RGB components.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO supplied by MSI:

GPU
RTX 2080 Ti (TU102)
Stream Processor
3584
Video Memory
11GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
352-bit
Engine Clock
1350MHz
GPU Clock Boost
1755MHz
Memory Clock
1750MHz – 14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x USB 3.1 Type-C
Recommended Power Supply
650W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Triple-fan solution
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
327 x 140 x 55.6 mm

The Turing TU102 GPU

Here’s the NVIDIA TU102 in all its glory. Yes, it’s huge; measuring 775mm^2 and composed of 18.6 billion transistors, it is by some margin the largest consumer GPU released to date. It’s also the most complex, incorporating a brand new architecture that re-imagines the Shader Module as a hybrid rendering engine capable of rasterization, real-time raytracing and deep learning inferencing simultaneously.

A fully equipped TU102 is an absolute beast. Up to 4608 CUDA cores are supported, 20% more than the 3840 in the Pascal-based TITAN Xp. But that’s only the starting point. With Turing, two new components are now part of the Shader Module: Tensor Cores, and RT Cores. Each Shader Module incorporates eight of the former and one of the latter for a total of 576 and 72 respectively.

Pascal vs Turing SM Block Diagrams (simplified)

Turing Tensor Cores are extremely capable at mixed precision workloads, and by natively supporting INT4 operations is well suited to the task of inferencing. The RT Core by comparison is dedicated to optimizing the process of raytracing, and thanks to this dedicated hardware accelerates the process tenfold over the GTX 1080Ti.

The RTX 2080 Ti slightly reduces the number of active SMs to 68, commensurately also reducing the number of active Tensor and RT cores. Don’t be surprised if the TITAN branding gets another turn at bat in this generation.

—-

A New Workload Model – RTX-OPS

The RTXOPS Of A RTX 2080 Ti

The Turing architecture powerfully changes the way that NVIDIA graphics hardware processes the task of rendering a frame with mixed data structures and precision. NVIDIA are calling this RTX-OPS (RTX Operations Per Second), and it can be used as a metric to define how fast the GPU is with these parallel workloads. The RTX 2080 Ti Founder’s Edition is capable of 78 RTXOPS; it remains to be seen whether in the future this manner of delineating performance will be as widely used as TFLOPS.

As you can see, the RTX-OPS model is strongly parallelized. Ray tracing and Int32 shading operates alongside FP32 shading (i.e. rasterization), while Neural Network processing operates when the frame is rendered. It’s neat, and explains how NVIDIA were able to push ray tracing to the forefront even after algorithmic optimisations were developed.

Additional Improvements

UPDATED CACHE & SHARED MEMORY ARCHITECTURE

Turing implements further optimisations to the cache and share memory system, probably partly as a consequence of making more data available to these new processor components.

Due in part to this NVIDIA claim ~50% improved performance per core when shading, although not all that improvement will be immediately reflected in final frame rates.

NEXT-GEN MEMORY

In another industry first Turing debuts GDDR6 support, replacing GDDR5X VRAM seen on the high-end Pascal cards. This memory interface is considerably faster than GDDR5 and GDDR5X, rivalling HBM memory in the amount of bandwidth is supplies to the GPU. End-to-end optimization also lowers crosstalk, improving stability.

The higher effective memory bandwidth available to Turing GPUs – measured by NVIDIA to be on the order of 50% – will be particularly useful at higher resolutions and image quality settings. The GTX 1080 Ti was always a solid 4K gaming GPU with moderate image quality settings; just how far can the RTX 2080 Ti go?

VIRTUALLINK

Unveiled earlier this year by a consortium of stakeholders in the VR industry, VirtualLink is a new standard for single-cable connections to VR Head-Mounted Displays. In incorporates data, power and display lines into a single compact connector that’s a slight twist on the USB Type-C specification.

As well as USB 3.1 Gen2 data lines, the VirtualLink standard supports four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort and can supply up to 27 Watts of power. It will reduce the number of trailing cables between PC and HMD to one, and should also reduce cost over time.

The GeForce RTX 20-Series graphics cards are the first in the market to support the VirtualLink standard, well ahead of HMDs that are compliant with it. That’s certainly going above and beyond to future-proof the card, but we wonder if a header and front-panel-connector approach may not be the final iteration of this emerging standard.

You can read more about VirtualLink at https://sites.google.com/view/virtuallink-consortium/home

Features – DLSS

WHAT IS RTX?

Lets be clear: RTX does not mean ‘Real-time Raytracing’. This misunderstanding has been bubbling underneath the surface since Jensen’s original reveal of the new GPU architecture at Gamescom, and needs to be dispelled. RTX is in fact an umbrella term of a raft of new rendering techniques – some announced, some still in the pipeline – which rely on NVIDIA RTX-class hardware to execute. Think of it as being a bit like GameWorks, only the hardware it can be run on is even more restrictive.

To their credit, by making RTX part of the graphics card branding the end-user should be in an excellent position to know whether a particular feature will run on their hardware. At a time when we’re often critical of hardware manufacturers using opaque terminology and naming schema that can potentially confuse consumers, it’s really a breath of fresh air to see NVIDIA take this step.

NVIDIA’s Raytracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) are two of the techniques that sit under the RTX umbrella. These leverage RT Cores and Tensor Cores which together are hardware components currently unique to the Turing architecture.

DEEP LEARNING SUPER-SAMPLING

In today’s games a rendered frame usually isn’t the final image that you see on screen. This frame also undergoes post-processing to remove artefacts generated by the rendering process, the most well-understood of which is the jagged edges brought about by aliasing. These post-processing techniques, including anti-aliasing, are quite expensive computationally but cheaper than rendering at a higher than needed higher resolution and averaging the pixels down.

But how about instead leveraging the enormous power of Neural Networks to sharpen the image, perhaps even side-stepping many of the known weaknesses of traditional anti-aliasing techniques? Deep Learning Super-Sampling is just such a technique.

As it turns out image processing has been one of the early success stories for Neural Network development, a field that NVIDIA has lead with continued improvements to their hardware architecture and developer tools. Deep Learning Super-Sampling, or DLSS for short, begins before players even load up the game. The game developer supplies NVIDIA with a beta build of the game – it doesn’t need to be 100% bug-free, but should be able to render frames representative of the final in-game experience. NVIDIA use this to generate thousands of reference images, rendered at the ‘gold standard’ image quality of 64x supersampling.

“64x supersampling means that instead of shading each pixel once, we shade at 64 different offsets within the pixel, and then combine the outputs, producing a resulting image with ideal detail and anti-aliasing quality.”

These reference frames are used alongside raw captured images rendered at the same time to train a DLSS neural network which, when presented with a raw captured image, can generate an output that matches the 64x supersampled reference. The process of training the neural network is iterative, and utilises a technique known as back-propagation to adjust weights in the network with each iteration.

The final DLSS network is one that has learned to produce images which closely approximate the 64x supersampled reference, which is good. However it also sidesteps the problems of traditional anti-aliasing such as issues with transparencies and blurring, which is even better.

So that’s the hard part done, and it has only required the power of super-computer to do it. If you think super-sampling is hard, it’s got nothing on training a neural network. But the powerful aspect of DLSS is that this trained neural network can be shared and run on inferencing hardware, i.e. a GPU. You’re not training any more, and inferencing is much quicker.

So the DLSS network, trained for scenes in one or a narrow selection of games, is supplied to GPUs via the driver download system. When running the game the GPU takes each rendered frame and runs it through the DLSS network with a single input image as reference, outputting a finished image that’s far higher quality than the rendered frame. Plus, with NVIDIA RTX inferencing with the network is actually exceptionally fast as it leverages the Tensor cores of the Turing GPU.

Unlike some post-processing techniques DLSS needs a few tweaks to the game prior to implementation, and of course the DLSS neural network needs to have been generated by NVIDIA. At present there are two means to see it in action – the Epic Infiltrator demo, and a Final Fantasy DLSS demo. So far it’s been announced that developers from a multitude of studios are working to integrate it into 25 games:

– Ark: Survival Evolved from Studio Wildcard
– Atomic Heart from Mundfish
– Dauntless from Phoenix Labs
– Fractured Lands from Unbroken Studios
– Final Fantasy XV from Square Enix
– Hitman 2 from IO Interactive / Warner Bros.
– Islands of Nyne from Define Human Studios
– Justice from NetEase
– JX3 from Kingsoft
– MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
– PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds from PUBG Corp.
– Remnant: From the Ashes from Arc Games
– Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass from Croteam / Devolver Digital
– Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes
– The Forge Arena from Freezing Raccoon Studios
– We Happy Few from Compulsion Games / Gearbox
– Darksiders 3 by Gunfire Games / THQ Nordic
– Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna by KeokeN Interactive
– Fear the Wolves by Vostok Games / Focus Home Interactive
– Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice by Ninja Theory
– KINETIK by Hero Machine Studios
– Outpost Zero by Symmetric Games / tinyBuild Games
– Overkill’s The Walking Dead by Overkill Software / Starbreeze Studios
– SCUM by Gamepires / Devolver Digital
– Stormdivers by Housemarque

Features – Real-Time Raytracing

It’s no exaggeration to say that real-time raytracing is the holy grail of graphics rendering, but has been considered to be years, perhaps decades away from being realised. The issue is that it’s inordinately complicated and computationally expensive, to the extent that movie and animation studios dedicate years and whole supercomputers to just rendering high-fidelity raytraced images. Games instead rely on rasterization and post-processing techniques to do their best approximation of a raytraced scene simply in order to generate frames in real-time.

“Reflections”, A Star Wars UE4 Demo Featuring Real-time Raytracing

For all its speed, rasterization has a number of weaknesses. Chief among these are dynamic reflections and shadows, both of which require simplifications and algorithmic tweaks to look anything like realistic, and only tend to incorporate objects within the scene. And as you’ve probably noticed, improving the rendered quality of these aspects of a scene still tends to tank frame rates. If only ray-tracing could be performed at real-time, even operating on only a few elements of a scene, realism could be improved substantially.

NVIDIA have plenty of background in GPU-accelerated raytracing, and through NVIDIA Iray plugins and the Optix engine have for years been providing tools to industries that aid in the swift generation of realistic imagery. A breakthrough allowed Volta hardware to process a realistic raytraced scene in real-time, culminating in the first public debut of the now-famous Star Wars Reflections demo running on four Volta GPUs. But even this is a far cry from operating at 60+fps on a single GPU, as expected in modern gaming applications.

NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, as it happens, advances development further through the incorporation of new many hardware-based raytracing acceleration engines known as RT Cores. An RT core is present in each Turing Shader Module module, implicitly making it a scalable technology as the GPU increases in size from the TU106 to the huge 775mm^2 TU102. But the real trick is the use of Hybrid Rendering.

” RT Cores work together with advanced denoising filtering, a highly-efficient Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure developed by NVIDIA Research, and RTX compatible APIs to achieve real time ray tracing on single Turing GPU. RT Cores traverse the BVH autonomously, and by accelerating traversal and ray/triangle intersection tests, they offload the SM, allowing it to handle other vertex, pixel, and compute shading work. Functions such as BVH building and refitting are handled by the driver, and ray generation and shading is managed by the application through new types of shaders.”

Hybrid Rendering is a combination of both rasterization and real-time raytracing, the former used where it is optimal while the latter is used selectively where it would make the most visual impact. These could be reflections, shadows, refractions or other core elements that game developers feel is important to their game world; Battlefield 5 for instance utilises real-time raytracing to process reflections, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider apply the technology to shadows.

A critical aspect of Hybrid Rendering is that both rasterization and real-time raytracing pipelines operate in parallel rather than sequentially. Furthermore raytracing, just like rasterization, can have its complexity dialled back based on utilisation and available GPU horsepower. NVIDIA have developed de-noising filters (known as the NVIDIA Real-Time Ray Tracing Denoiser modules) which can greatly reduce the number of rays required per pixel to generate the desired visual impact, thus improving computational efficiency.

Microsoft have built raytracing into their DirectX Raytracing (DXR) extension of the DX12 API, and game engines will use these hooks to tap into NVIDIA’s hardware acceleration for raytracing. In theory it’s possible to use older GPUs for this application, but without RT cores rendering each frame would take an age; the RTX 2080 Ti is capable of processing rays 10 times faster than an GTX 1080 Ti. DXR is scheduled to roll out with the Windows Fall 2018 Update, after which games can implement the technology and NVIDIA can begin to unlock the functionality at the driver level.

So far eleven games have been announced to be incorporating elements of raytracing through DXR and NVIDIA RTX technologies:

– Assetto Corsa Competizione from Kunos Simulazioni / 505 Games
– Atomic Heart by Mundfish
– Battlefield V from DICE
– Control from Remedy Entertainment / 505 Games
– Enlisted by Gaijin Entertainment/Darkflow Software
– Justice from NetEase
– JX3 from Kingsoft
– MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games
– Metro Exodus from 4A Games
– ProjectDH from Nexon’s devCAT Studio.
– Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Square Enix/Eidos-Montréal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes

Actual implementation into the finished game may not be immediate or on launch, but NVIDIA have been forthright in the opinion that developers are extremely excited by the scope of the technology. Also, implementation might be relatively straightforward in the grand scheme of things; the Shadow of the Tomb Raider developers apparently had only a few weeks to prepare their demo for Gamescom.

Of course, this only just skims the surface of NVIDIA’s new real-time raytracing technologies. NVIDIA have additional resources available if you’re keen on delving deeper.

Closer Look (Overview)

GAMING X TRO is presented in a large box with a sneak preview of what’s in store via a depiction of the tail-end of the graphics card. Besides this, we have the usual branding from MSI and NVIDIA regarding this SKU. Taking a look at the reverse reveals a breakdown of the prominent features – emphasis placed on the cooling solution. Inside, the card is well-protected with foam padding and an anti-static bag. As far as accessories go, the only items we receive are a 6-pin to 8-pin power cable and a support bracket for the graphics card/chassis.

The magnitude of this graphics card is felt immediately following its removal from the packaging. There is no denying that MSI are here to do business. GAMING X TRIO sports a triple fan configuration by way of TRI-FROZR cooler with TORX fan 3.0. The smaller fan which is named the “dispersion fan” has a stepper curve to quicken airflow while the other two fans provide consistent pressure over the heatsink underneath. This graphics card also benefits from ‘Zero Frozr’ which allows the fan to stop spinning if the temperatures remain under 60C – this will obviously help to keep noise levels to a minimum. Later on we’ll observe the cooler design in more detail when we detach it from the PCB.

Not only are there a multitude of different textures and materials on the top-side of the GAMING X TRIO but along the edges we have four RGB LEDs which correspond to MSI’s Mystic Light technology. When the card is powered up, these LEDs will light up and can have their colour modified using the Mystic Light software.

Casting an eye over the edge of GAMING X TRIO there is a panel with MSI and GEFORCE RTX typography, this marries up with the lighting configuration and can be adjusted in the Mystic Light software too.

Along this edge we can just make out the metal brace which attaches the rear IO panel and provides a two-fold benefit of cooling on-board components like VRAM while also pairing up with the backplate to keep the PCB rigid.

In this region we also have the NVLink port which allows gamers to pair up this graphics card with another, NVLINK offers 50x the transfer bandwidth over previous generation SLI. A dedicated NVLink Bridge will need to be purchased from NVIDIA to pair up two graphics cards. Currently they are $79 USD.

While GAMING X TRIO may take up just two spots on the computer chassis – the height of the cooler will drift into another slot on the motherboard and this should be taken into account. On the rear IO panel there quite a selection of video outs which include:

3x DP 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0
1x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C (for next-gen VR support)

On the next page we’ll continue our look at the GAMING X TRIO.

Closer Look (Overview Cont.)

To effectively run this graphics card, MSI recommends a 650W PSU. As you can clearly see from the above shot, GAMING X TRIO gobbles up PCI-E connectors for its breakfast! You will need 8+8+6 from the PSU.

Flipping the card over onto its reverse, there is a large metal backplate fastened to the PCB. This backplate acts as a thermal solution for the components on the backside of the PCB and also gives GAMING X TRIO rigidity – preventing the PCB from flexing.

As you can tell, removing this back plate requires a large quantity of screws to be removed.

On the next page we’ll detach the cooling solution and look more closely at the internal components.

Closer Look (Detaching Cooler/Internals)

After detaching the cooler from the PCB, we can get a better understanding of how this solution works. There are a total of seven copper heatpipes with a large double heatsink. The GPU has a large plate which makes contact and the VRM configuration also has its own plate in order to distribute heat.

MSI has given GAMING X TRIO cooling on the backside of the PCB – usually the thermal design is almost always concerns itself with the frontside. The back of the GPU and GDDR6 all have thermal pads which sit over them and which pair up with the backplate to alleviate heat.

The above shot shows the PCB with and without the brace/cooling pad. This piece of kit ensures the board does not bend or flex and sits over the GDDR6 chips and left-side power phases. It’s great to see MSI implementing such a feature and this highlights that they aren’t taking any chances.

It should also be noted that this is a custom PCB and is not reference.

GAMING X TRIO bears one of the biggest digital phase designs we’ve encountered. This graphics card uses a 14+3 system.

At the very heart of our RTX 2080 Ti is of course NVIDIA’s Turing – TU102. While the memory frequency on this GAMING X TRIO has been untouched, the GPU clock boost has been factory overclocked to push it up to 1755MHz. The question is, will this be enough to allow MSI to climb to the top of the GPU leaderboard?

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:
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2070 OC
MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti OC
ZOTAC GAMING RTX 2080 Ti AMP
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
NVIDIA GTX 1070 AMD Radeon RX Vega 56
Special thanks go to Acermedia, 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

Gamers can experience silence from the GAMING X TRIO if the GPU sits underneath the 60C threshold, but with even with the fans spinning the noise emitted from this card can be regarded as very-low.

Overclocking

To overclock our MSI graphics card we used the MSI Afterburner tool.

Out of the box the GPU clock boosts to 1755MHz and the memory clock speed is left at reference 1750MHz. We were able to modify both parameters easily and achieve 1875MHz for the GPU clock and 1925MHz for the memory clock.

In the real world, applying such an overclock to both attributes of the RTX 2080 Ti allows us to gain an extra 10fps in-game – see below for the comparison.

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

Initial reaction to NVIDIA’s RTX 20-series has been met with some criticism and this is understandably so. At the end users side, while there are next-gen features present they are mostly unusable at this stage and prices compared to last season’s GTX 10-Series have soared astronomically.

However, with no clear rival in the high-performance graphics card sector, NVIDIA could have provided a refresh with just incremental performance benefits (much like Intel had done prior to AMD Ryzen) but they didn’t. Instead, they chose to revolutionize with true next-gen features like Ray Tracing and DLSS. Argument could be made that we’re not quite ready for both of these features – compatible games have been announced, but most are quite a way off. That argument is justified in one regard but in another, game developers need the hardware and technology in order to incorporate this into their games – without RTX hardware and Ray Tracing capabilities games would remain as they currently are, rasterized.

So, NVIDIA are to be commended for moving the market forwards. The benefits may not be so immediately clear but they will be soon. We recently met with NVIDIA for a private session to demo Ray Tracing first-hand in the upcoming Metro Exodus and the results were spectacular.

With that said, what is MSI’s rendition of the RTX 2080 Ti like? Well, the GAMING X TRIO is an outstanding card in almost every aspect. It looks fantastic, operates at low temperatures, low noise, has all the RGB features and overclocks beyond the factory overclock, reasonably well.

In all of the games we tested the GAMING X TRIO came out neck-and-neck with the other RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards and that’s because the other solutions on the market also feature a similar factory overclock to this MSI variant.

The strength of the digital phase design can be felt by way of the overclocking result. Beyond the factory overclock we were able to nudge up the frequencies of the GPU and memory clock – allowing us to tap into an extra 10fps in-game. Even after a significant overclock (with intensity placed on the components) the overall temperatures remained in the realm of ‘sensible‘ thanks to the Tri-Frozr design, which is well-thought out and very capable.

As we’ve already pointed out, the RTX 2080 Ti isn’t going to win any value for money awards and this GAMING X TRIO comes in at a cost of UK £1199 US $1200 AUS $2099. We’re on NVIDIA’s side so far as commending them for the new tech, but we still feel the overall cost is too high. Against other 2080 Ti graphics cards the GAMING X TRIO is of the cheaper options out there, which is good to see.

MSI’s RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO delights in all aspects – this high-performance graphics card will give you blistering performance while keeping cool and quiet and there is even more headroom to squeeze out extra performance with a manual overclock!

Pros
+ Pleasing to the eye
+ Well-designed
+ Excellent build quality
+ Excellent performance
+ Allows for decent manual overclock
+ Arrives with USB 3.1 Type-C port
+ Graphics card support bracket included

Mediocre
+- Other 2080 Ti cards are cooler
+- Only one HDMI 2.0 port

Cons
– Large
– Heavy
– Expensive

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