Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti benchmarks: the new top card tested

Even without taking ray tracing into account, the 2080 Ti still impresses.

Will Judd

Senior Staff Writer, Digital Foundry

The RTX 2080 Ti is the fastest graphics card that Nvidia have ever made, a Titan in all but name. The bulk of Nvidia's marketing has targeted its newer capabilities, like real-time ray tracing (RTX) and deep learning super-sampling (DLSS), and these are exciting topics with the potential to change the industry to be sure. However, we wanted to know how the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 actually perform in real games, ones which haven't yet added support for Nvidia's latest and greatest technologies - so we've tested nine popular PC titles from the past few years to show you exactly the level of performance you should expect.
After all, even setting aside the new features of the RTX cards, there's still a simple need for faster GPUs that are better able to cope with higher resolutions and higher refresh rates. Even the previous highest-end consumer card, the GTX 1080 Ti, struggles to run all games at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. Moreover, the recent arrival of 4K monitors that refresh at a buttery-smooth 144Hz means that there's always room for GPU performance improvements. Thankfully, the RTX 2080 Ti absolutely delivers, offering at least 20 per cent better performance than the GTX 1080 Ti in almost all titles, and sometimes much more.
While the focus of this article is on the raw performance numbers - see our GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti review for the full story - we will also briefly examine DLSS performance as well. That's because this technique can allow for potentially massive performance gains on top of what the RTX series cards already provide, and this new tech has already been confirmed for 28 titles.
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In our testing, we'll compare the RTX 2080 Ti against the RTX 2080 and the two graphics cards they replace, the GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1080. We'll also throw in AMD's top graphics card, the Vega 64. We've focusing our testing on 4K, as these high-end cards would be overkill for most 1080p or 1440p titles - and we've only had a few days to test the cards. It's also worth mentioning that the RTX cards are Founders Editions cards which come factory-overclocked by Nvidia, while the previous generation of reference designs came at stock clocks.

The RTX 2080 Ti seems the obvious choice for deep-pocketed gamers, offering significant gains over the GTX 1080 Ti in all titles and the promise of exciting DLSS and RTX technology in a select few.

	RTX 2080 Ti	RTX 2080	GTX 1080 Ti	GTX 1080	Vega 64
GPU cores	4352	2944	3584	2560	4096
Giga Rays/sec	10	8	1.21	1?	?
RTX-OPS	78T (76T)	60T (57T)	12T	8T	?
VRAM	11GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	11GB GDDR5X	8GB GDDR5X	8GB HBM2
Memory Bus	352-bit	256-bit	352-bit	256-bit	2048-bit
Mem. Bandwidth	616GB/s	448GB/s	484GB/s	352GB/s	439GB/s
Base Clock	1350MHz	1515MHz	1480MHz	1607MHz	1200MHz
Boost Clock	1635MHz (1545MHz)	1800MHz (1710MHz)	1582MHz	1733MHz	1536MHz
TDP	260W (250W)	225W (215W)	250W	180W	295W

The table above includes the Founders Edition figures, with the reference equivalents in parentheses.