Road test: new Nvidia graphics card RTX 2080 Ti is the future of gaming, if you’re ready to pay for it
- Real-time ray tracing, used by film studios, is the big selling point of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs, and makes gaming a surreal experience
- Barely 20 games currently use real-time ray tracing, so for now US$1,199 card may draw gamers with deep pockets who like to crank up the settings
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 series is the company’s next generation of graphics card, and promises to be significantly faster than the GTX 1080 and with support for real-time ray tracing, a technology that makes video game graphics look more realistic than ever before.
We put the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition GPU through its paces to see how it performs.
Hardware
The first impressions when picking up the RTX 2080 Ti are its gorgeous lines and heft. Sheathed in matte, machine-finished aluminium, the top-tier GPU certainly feels every bit like its US$1,199 price tag. Nvidia has done away with the blower – commonly found in computer servers – in the 2080 Ti Founders Edition for a pair of axial fans that your ears will appreciate. Under the hood, though, lies an advanced full-length vapour chamber to keep the GPU cool.
The RTX 2080 Ti draws a whopping 260 watts, a huge step up from the 180 watts of the GTX 1080. Nvidia now recommends at least a 650W power supply for stable operation, which means that gaming enthusiasts with a compatible two- or three-year-old PC are likely to require a new power supply unit (PSU).
We had to swap out an older 550W PSU for a new Cooler Master V1000 PSU rated at 1,000 watts to test the GPU. The fully modular design of the V1000 should make future upgrades less of a hassle. The RTX 2080 Ti itself comes with an HDMI 2.0b connector and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs with the ability to drive monitors of up to 8K resolution.
Gamers concerned about future-proofing will be glad to know of the built-in USB-C port with support for VirtualLink, a new industry standard backed by the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft to support next-generation VR headsets.
Software and set-up
Installation entails plugging the RTX 2080 Ti into an available PCIe slot on your PC. Helping feed the GPU’s appetite for power are two 8-pin connectors, so be sure that both are plugged in. The “GeForce RTX” logo on the side lights up upon powering up, which looks really cool if you have a transparent PC case. For extreme users thinking of installing two of the GPUs, the “NVLink” interconnector is hidden behind a removable cover – the NVLink bridge must be bought separately.
One downside of the non-blower design of the RTX 2080 Ti is the potential for hot air to be recirculated within the chassis. With the GPU temperature rated at up to 89 degrees Celsius, this means you need to ensure enough ventilation for your PC. In our case, the test PC stayed cool due to the use of liquid cooling, with a separate heat radiator for the CPU.
The GPU wasn’t recognised by Windows 10 on our system upon starting up, but this was easily resolved by downloading and installing the latest GeForce Experience driver from Nvidia’s website.
One of the highly touted capabilities of the RTX 2080 Ti is its real-time support for ray tracing, a rendering technique traditionally used in film studios for extremely realistic lighting effects.
To enable ray tracing, you need to ensure that the October 2018 Windows Update is installed, as this update adds native ray tracing support to Windows 10. You can still play games that support ray tracing without the update, but the feature will not be used – and you will not get any warning about it.
Performance
So how does the RTX 2080 Ti fare, considering that the new powerhouse GPU chip features a jaw-dropping 18.6 billion transistors? We tried out Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, both of which belong to the small number of games that support ray tracing. With graphic configuration cranked to the highest settings, both ran with buttery smooth performance and incredible detail.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider averaged more than 80 FPS (frames per second) according to its internal benchmarking test, offering a very comfortable gaming experience. At the highest settings, you can make out the wisps of hair on Lara Croft’s head and the splatters of mud on her face in detail.
In Battlefield V, trekking through a war-torn wasteland in the rain was a surreal experience, with rainwater sluicing off rocks and muddy pathways, and the ripples of water in a stream.
In both games, explosions and the ricochets from bullets are highly realistic, and reflections on polished surfaces show up as you expect them to. In addition, shadows are more lifelike, with shadow interactions that look correct thanks to the power of ray tracing.
We also put the GPU to a stress test on popular computer benchmarking tool 3DMark, and saw that the temperature of the CPU stayed in the mid-70 degrees Celsius, while fan noise was not audible from the PC placed at floor level.
Conclusion
Is it worth getting the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti? Nvidia is clearly banking on real-time ray tracing being the future of gaming with the RTX 20 series of GPUs. On the flip side, not too many games currently make use of the technology, though this will probably improve over time. At launch, the list of games that incorporates ray tracing number fewer than two dozen.
This is not to say that the RTX 2080 Ti isn’t a significant improvement over Nvidia’s previous-generation GPUs. Certainly, it delivers cutting edge performance in spades for high-quality PC gaming of more than 60 FPS with the current generation of games. With its high asking price of US$1,199, I suspect the real question is whether the performance bump is worth the premium.
If you are a gamer who has deep pockets, loves to crank up all the settings and who simply cannot tolerate anything but the best, then the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will certainly sate your appetite for performance.
