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RTX-2080Ti

Yesterday, I argued that Nvidia fans and customers should hold off on ownership a new RTX GPU until Nvidia had really demonstrated how much of a performance improvement these GPUs would deliver in current aircraft titles. The company, at that point, just had non demonstrated its new cards would offer enough boosted functioning to make pre-ordering one a wise decision.

Nvidia just released a new set of 4K results that claim to show a fifty percent gap between the Nvidia GTX 1080 and the Turing-based RTX 2080SEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce. This is theoretically the kind of data we demand to draw some conclusions about relative performance uplift betwixt the RTX and GTX families. Unfortunately, the only matter this data does is strengthen the argument that Nvidia isn't bringing much to the table for anyone but well-heeled enthusiasts. Let'due south look at why.

rtx-2080-vs-1080

The white bar represents the nominal performance of the GTX 1080, the darker light-green is the RTX 2080 solitary, and the bright green is the RTX 2080 when using Nvidia'due south new anti-aliasing method, DLSS. We're going to ignore DLSS here, not because there'southward something incorrect with it — I've loathed jagged edges in antialiasing for decades and have picked my GPUSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce before based on how well its anti-aliasing mechanisms functioned — just considering it represents a characteristic that only 1 bill of fare has and that requires software support from the programmer to enable. Our focus, therefore, is strictly on the gray and nighttime greenish bars — and on the prices of the two GPUs being compared. And pricing is where all this falls apart.

The Importance of Toll

Price equality (or as best equally can be practically achieved) is one of the most important ways to help end-users decide whether a component represents a good deal. The GTX 1080SEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce, currently bachelor for as little every bit $450, is between 56 pct and 64 percent the cost of a new RTX 2080 (depending on if yous go Founders Edition). Of course the RTX 2080 is faster. The relevant question is, does that increased performance correspond a ameliorate bargain?

Your results depend a bit on which starting numbers you choose since these cards have a range of toll points. The current best-example for the GTX 1080 – RTX 2080 comparison is that the RTX 2080 is 1.55x more expensive and delivers ~one.5x more functioning. If you lot accept to purchase the Fe or an equivalent OEM menu to run into those performance numbers, and then you'd be paying at least 1.77x more coin for 1.5x performance. Yes, the final production is faster — simply you're also paying considerably more for it. And "More expensive hardware delivers better functioning at an increasingly bad price/performance ratio" isn't the type of headline that gets people excited. It'south also admittedly no help to people who might be able to swing spending $450 – $550 on a new card merely just tin can't afford to footstep up to the $700 – $800 mark.

Subsequently Nvidia's price hikes, the RTX 2080 is no longer the appropriate point of comparison for the GTX 1080. Then what happens when nosotros compare the RTX 2080 with its actual competitor, the $700 GTX 1080 Ti?  Information technology just so happens that [H]ardOCP recently published an article comparing the GTX 1080 against the 1080 Ti. So permit's look at that data set and estimate how much the 1080 Ti would slice into Nvidia's results.

[H]ardOCP tested Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, GTA Five, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, Sniper Elite four, Mass Effect Andromeda, Kingdom Come Deliverance, and Far Weep 5. The GTX 1080 Ti is, on average, 1.27x faster than the GTX 1080. If nosotros assume that those averages hold beyond the ecosystem, nosotros can expect the RTX 2080 to exist roughly 1.23x faster than the GTX 1080 Ti at the same price point. There could be some shifts depending on resolution and particular level differences, but we'd expect those to favor the 1080 Ti if anything. Any bottleneck that specifically slowed the GTX 1080 would give the 1080 Ti's additional horsepower more than room to shine.

At that place's zero wrong with a i.2x functioning boost, simply Nvidia knows it'due south not the kind of affair that'll get gamers talking. It'due south certainly non the kind of comeback that gets someone to blitz out and replace a 1080 Ti they merely bought within the past 18 months. And so instead of acknowledging this point, they elided it by comparison the GTX 1080 to a much more expensive GPU that information technology wouldn't normally compete against. When you set the competition appropriately, up to one-half of Nvidia's claimed performance improvement may vanish.

Another point to go along in listen is that Nvidia is challenge that this data represents the GTX 1080, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 with DLSS enabled. This implies that the other GPUs are both using some kind of functioning-impacting AA solution to start with. That'due south the merely way the 2080's performance would meliorate past using AI for antialiasing, equally opposed to any method it had previously been using. In that location's naught wrong with using AA when analyzing GPUs; virtually all of our GPU testing is conducted with antialiasing enabled. Just readers should be aware that using AA tin modify relative performance between 2 solutions, and that since nosotros take no idea what AA methods were used in the games Nvidia lists, we don't know how having it enabled would affect performance between Turing and Pascal. The size of the increase from baseline 2080 to 2080 + DLSS suggests that the initially deployed solution was quite rigorous.

Final indicate: None of these tests appear to bear upon the ray tracing side of Nvidia's new capabilities. The only feature being tested and showcased hither is the Deep Learning Super-Sampling. We don't yet know what kind of a performance striking Turing takes in games with RTX enabled versus disabled.

Conclusions

Thus far, the debut of the RTX 2080 mostly feels like Nvidia attempting to justify the toll increases it'due south slapping on its video cards. We've graphed the launch price of Nvidia's flagship models going all the way dorsum to Fermi. It makes for some interesting reading:

For four generations, (GTX 295 – GTX 680) Nvidia kept the aforementioned $500 price for its flagship card. The GTX 780 surged up to $649 for launch only vicious lower in six months thanks to AMD's Hawaii-based R9 290 and R9 290X. Maxwell tacked a minor $50 increase on height-stop price, merely nada crazy. Commencement in 2022, all the same, Nvidia began aggressively charging more, especially if y'all bought a Founders card. If you desire to purchase an RTX 2080 card in 2022 the fashion you bought a GTX 980 card in 2022, Nvidia wants an extra $150 – $250 for the privilege. Information technology's a far cry from what we used to run into, just a few years ago, when Nvidia brought dramatically improved functioning to the same price points year-on-year, even at the top of the market. AMD's difficulty competing at the height of the GPU market place is reflected in Nvidia's pricing. At the rate costs are increasing, Intel's 2022 GPUs can't come soon enough.

Based on the results we've seen to date, Nvidia's RTX 2080 looks to evangelize between 1.15x – ane.3x boosted performance compared with the GTX 1080 Ti at the aforementioned price point in mainstream titles that do not have advantage of its features. The claims of 50 percentage-plus improvements do not withstand scrutiny given the difference in price between the two solutions. Every bit e'er, all of this analysis should be considered preliminary and speculative based on publicly available information, merely non final hardware. It's possible that other, every bit-even so-undisclosed enhancements to the GPU core could impact the terminal analysis.

At present Read: Don't Buy the Ray-Traced Hype Around the Nvidia RTX 2080, Nvidia Announces List of Games with RTX Back up, and How Nvidia's RTX Existent-Fourth dimension Ray Tracing Works