NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review

Armed with Turing-based architecture via the TU104, and aimed squarely at 1440p; we take a detailed look at NVIDIA’s new RTX 2080 graphics card courtesy of the Founders Edition.

Product on Review: GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Street Price: £749 GBP – $799 USD – $1199 AUD

So far we’ve encountered a number of RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards in our coverage of the new NVIDIA RTX 20-series launch but today we’re set to weigh up what the non-Ti version has to offer in terms of performance, value and other elements.

Partner cards are often the more favoured route for graphics card selection but favour for the Founders Edition directly from NVIDIA has been gaining momentum over the last few years and today we’ll be examining one such variant.

Under the spotlight today is the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Founders Edition – this graphics card features a newly revised vapour chamber cooler with dual-fan design and even comes with a subtle factory overclock straight out the box.

Is a move to the RTX 20-series worth the investment under the RTX 2080? Let’s find out!

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Founders Edition

The factory overclocked GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition graphics card features a next-gen 8-phase power supply for maximum overclocking and dual-axial 13-blade fans coupled with a new vapor chamber for ultra-cool and quiet performance.

Technical Specifications

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

GPU
RTX 2080 (TU104)
Stream Processor
2944
Video Memory
8GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
256-bit
Engine Clock
1515MHz
Engine Clock Boost
1800MHz
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
550W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Double-fan solution
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
115.7 x 267 x 54 mm

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)

In a departure from convention, the RTX reference cooler design utilises a dual-fan configuration and has had quite a significant overhaul to the previous GTX-10 series solution. NVIDIA are using a two-tone style which merges a bluey metal to matt black plastic. The use of such metal not only gives this graphics card that premium feel but it also increases the weight significantly. The Founders Edition is heavy – much heavier than other partner cards in the same class.

Taking a side look at the profile of RTX 2080 FE, (the side which is likely to be showcased in most clear panelled cases) we can see the expert craftsmanship and engineering that has gone into the production of this graphics card. Sharp and definitive lines are the order of the day with the GEFORCE RTX insignia in clear view – this logo emits a distinct green glow when the card has power.

From this viewpoint we can also see the angle of the 13-blade design on the cooling fans.

The PCI Express power connectors sit neatly on the edge of the graphics card – requiring 8+6-pin. This translates to 650W being the recommendation for the overall PSU wattage. Of course, we also advise a reputable brand when choosing such a power supply to ensure system stability.

NVIDIA has a new SLI connectors on the RTX 2080 – of which is concealed with a push-on cover. This SLI functionality is called NVLink which offers 50x the transfer bandwidth. A dedicated NVLink Bridge will need to be purchased from NVIDIA to pair up two graphics cards. Currently they are $79 USD.

Observing the rear IO ports on RTX 2080 FE, we have a sleek matt black plate. This may not be viewable since it’ll generally be at the back of the computer chassis, but we still dig the design choice over the traditional shiny silver aesthetic usually employed. Available on this panel we have:

3x DP 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0
1x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C

This introduction of USB on the rear panel may not seem relevant now but its presence serves as to future-proof for next-generation Virtual Reality units.

The back-side of RTX 2080 Founders Edition continues the luxurious quality we’ve already witnessed. The entire backside of the card bears a solid metal plate with the RTX 2080 emblem in the centre. This plate not only protects the PCB from flexing or getting scratched/knocked but it also holds a series of thermal pads in place for the components on the PCB – providing extra thermal efficiency.

Compliance standards are found on the labels towards the left-edge along with the serial number – which will be important should you experience any technical difficulties and need to contact technical support.

On the next page we’ll remove the cooler on FE to reveal the inner workings.

Closer Look (Detaching Cooler/Internals)

Removing the cooler from the Founders Edition should be done at your own risk – performing a cooler removal from this card takes considerably more time than a partner card and requires some 20+ screws to be detached.

Once the heatsink has been detached we can see the three significant components – the heatsink/fans, PCB and backplate. The backplate has a series of thermal pads which sit over the reverse of the PCB to provide supplementary cooling.

NVIDIA has employed a double capacity vapour chamber design which has “embedded heat pipe base plates”. The notion beyond this revised cooler is that it will offer cooler and quieter operation compared to previous iterations of the NVIDIA reference cooler – something which NVIDIA has struggled to overcome in previous generations of cards.

Overall, we were rather disappointed by the thermal pads/tape which NVIDIA has used on the Founders Edition – as you can clearly see from the photos these pads are crumbly in texture and the RAM (white) and phase (blue) pads appear to be disintegrated. This doesn’t bode well in long-term use and certainly in our case (after removing the cooler) we will almost undoubtedly need to replace the thermal pads with a third party solution.

Since we have the cooler detached, we can also take a look at the GPU and other components. RTX 2080 uses an 8-phase power design which allows greater headroom for two things – the factory overclock applied to the Founders Edition (over reference figures) and the ability to manually take the frequencies beyond those out of the box. The power delivery is also cleaner than we encountered under the GTX 10-series.

Sitting underneath the RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 2080 features another large Turing-based GPU – this time we’re dealing with TU104. Again this is produced on the 12nm process and comprises of 2944 shader units. Over the reference design which is offers a core clock of 1515MHz and boost of 1710MHz, this Founders Edition takes the boost up to 1800MHz and has a factory overclock.

The memory which surrounds the GPU arrives in the form of GDDR6 and 8GB of capacity. The frequency of the memory has been left at the stock settings of 14Gbps – the same speed as the RTX 2080 Ti.

Check out our manual overclock result later in this 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 Founders Edition
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 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

NVIDIA has redesigned their cooling configuration on the RTX 20-Series and the use of larger fans definitely helps with acoustics – however, noise from this card is still greater than we encounter on a partner card.

Overclocking

To overclock our NVIDIA RTX 2080 graphics card we used the MSI Afterburner tool.

Out of the box the GPU clock boosts to 1800MHz and the memory clock speed is left at reference 1750MHz. We were able to modify both parameters easily and achieve 1900MHz for the GPU clock and 2000MHz for the memory clock. This represents a 5% and 14% increase – an overall overclock of 19%.

In the real world, applying such an overclock to both attributes of the RTX 2080 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

A move to the NVIDIA RTX 20-series will require plenty of time and consideration. After pitting the GTX 10-series against the RTX 2080 the results are a mixture of fascination and slight dismay.

Where the RTX 2080 Ti is more suited to the 4K arena, the RTX 2080’s forte is 1080p or 1440p. In most games you’ll see a substantial benefit over the GTX 1080 Ti but in others, the result is almost marginal which will contribute to frustration for gamers who were perhaps expecting more from this next-generation product.

The real highlight with the RTX 2080 remains to be seen via DLSS and Ray Tracing – which will be available very soon. These technologies, along with other aspects like GDDR6 are tangible, next-gen features. Once the likes of Ray Tracing technology is active we’ll be adding extra games and analysing such techniques in future and existing articles.

The Founders Edition arrives with a factory overclock applied to the parameters which NVIDIA has set for the reference clock speeds. This results in the GPU clock hitting 1800MHz rather than 1750MHz. It’s nice to see NVIDIA providing a modification out of the box. Beyond this, we were able to nudge the clock speeds up even further – tweaking the memory clock and even the GPU clock boost figures. Our overclock to the memory saw the most impressive result – allowing us to move from 1750MHz up to 2000MHz. An overall adjustment of 19% was possible with the RTX 2080 Founders Edition, translating to an additional 10fps in-game.

The RTX 2080 may not bear the same monstrous pricing as its older brother but the reality is still hard to stomach. Founders Edition can be bought directly from NVIDIA for the lofty price of £749 GBP – $799 USD – $1199 AUD which is almost identical to where the GTX 1080 Ti currently sits.

NVIDIA has brought to market a true next-generation product in the RTX 20-series, the RTX 2080 Founders Edition is a worthy contender for the 1440p crown and the red team has a lot of work to do if they intend to compete in the high-performance segment of the graphics card market.

Pros
+ Attractive design
+ Excellent build quality
+ Great performance
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Allows for decent manual overclock
+ Arrives with USB 3.1 Type-C port

Cons
– Poor quality thermal tape/pads used
– Heavy
– Expensive

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