nVidia recently launch a new family of graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080TI respectively. At the official launch we could only see the performance of Ray-Tracing (a new technology included in the hardware of the new series of GPUs) and how amazing it is (yes the demos were truly awesome) but nothing about the true gaming performance over the previous Pascal generation. Lots of questions remained unanswered and everyone kept wondering:
1. What is the real world performance for me, the gamer?
2. Should I keep my 1080Ti/1080 or switch to the 2080/2080Ti? Or better yet: Do I really need to pay the hefty price for an RTX or go with the 10’th series? (Yes, the new cards are much more expensive over the previous generation).
I will address all of these in the following lines. Do note that this article is not a review of any kind, these are just my observations after watching and reading what more experienced people have tested these cards. I am the usual consumer that tries to form a documented opinion regarding a future upgrade and share with you my thoughts.
A few weeks have passed and the benchmarking embargo has lifted as well with new drivers to support the new GPUs (Funny thing: RTX video cards have been sent to people for unboxing but no driver support) which gave benchmarkers the chance to play with them and see what is the true performance of the new series of graphic cards.
Well let’s see some results
In previous launches of new architectures made by nVidia, the difference in performance of GPUs from one generation the the other was about 25-30% tops. Which is good, and as expected. The same apply to the current Turing GPUs as you can see from the graph bellow (GTX 1080 vs RTX 2080 running a 4K benchmark courtesy of and )
The same applies for the 1080Ti and 2080Ti:
As we can see in the above graphs the Turing cards perform wonderfully at 4K and the results are truly as expected. But there is a problem with these results. The tests were made on normal games, with NO Ray-Tracing what so ever as ray-tracing is currently not supported by any game available on the market to this date. Nothing, besides in the official launch, is mentioned anywhere about this awesome new technology.For now we just have to settle with the performance gains in classic built games with no fancy new tech to enjoy.
The last thing I want to talk about is the upgrade worthiness. The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti are the new kids on the block, and the fastest cards at this date for gaming, but right now they look somewhat less appealing or should I say un-affordable. The RTX 2080Ti is currently available for “just” $1200 MSRP (this is TITAN Xp money) and offers close to 30% performance boost over a 1080Ti, which you can get for under $700.
On the other side, the RTX 2080 is close to the 1080Ti but at a higher price point. Sure you can argue that it can beat a GTX1080 in every way but why bother buying a 2080 when you can get a 1080Ti and get the same performance and save a few bucks. I simply don’t understand what’s with these prices. Of course if you consider that the 20 series come with new tech that is missing in the 10’th series then yes the price is justified but at this moment we can’t put that to the test and see the RTX full potential.
Until Ray-tracing supported titles come out and perhaps after some driver updates, these cards should become more attractive. But by that time, cheaper, third party cards should also be available so this could potentially become a vicious circle, and the RTX cards might as well be lost in the dark.
My conclusion: Let’s wait for these cards to mature for a couple of months, because at this point no one, except maybe the enthusiasts who can’t live without having the new shiny card in their gaming rig, can buy the 20 series and be truly satisfied.