NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER Benchmarks and Review

NVIDIA is instrumental to ushering ray tracing to full spotlight in the market despite the little library of games that support it. Its now-defunct non-Super cards showed a significant bump in terms of performance versus its Pascal-based cards. That, alone, was reason enough for people to jump to upgrading their cards that support ray tracing.

Given this situation, it came as a surprise to consumers when they announced their SUPER cards at E3 2019. People can’t help but wonder if it was a way for them to counter the looming threat of AMDs NAVI-based cards, or simply a way to target consumers who haven’t upgraded their GPUs.

Today, we’re taking a look at the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super. It’s meant to replace the RTX 2080, and for what it’s worth (and to give you a TL;DR of this review), it’s powerful and better in terms of performance. If you’ve got an RTX 2080 or even an RTX 2070, this may not be for you. However, if you’re stuck from using a Pascal-based GPU at this time and have been looking to replace it, consider grabbing one.

The Lowdown

We expect the RTX 2080 Super to perform better than its previous line-up of cards. Now that both RTX 2070 and 2080 have been discontinued (though you will still be able to find some in shelves nationwide), the new Super cards are expected to perform decently better than its predecessors.

If we reference from the chart above, the RTX 2080 Super’s memory size hasn’t changed compared to its predecessor, but we see a decent performance bump thanks to its higher tensor flops.  While this is the case, we expect this to perform better than NVIDIA’s Titan XP at 15GBps if we solely base it from NVIDIA’s claim.

So yes – if you’re looking to replace your RTX 2080 with this one, we say “Hold your horse”. However, if you’re coming from a GTX 1080, then consider this the best replacement for that. This is the point of contention of this review, and if you do not fall from those who are planning to upgrade from Pascal to the new Turing line-up of NVIDIA, you may want to check our or our counterparts’ reviews.

Synthetic Benchmarks

As expected, RTX 2080 Super trumps over previous Pascal-based cards of Nvidia based on the synthetic benchmarks we ran using 3DMark.

Game Benchmarks

Our methodology: we provide basic benchmarking results by recording min, max and average fps of our gameplay in varying settings.

Our test bench:

• CPU: Intel – Core i7-7700K 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Processor
• Motherboard: Asus – MAXIMUS IX HERO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
• RAM: Corsair – Vengeance LED 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 Memory
• Power Supply: SeaSonic – 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super
• Monitor: ASUS ROG XG27VQ

We played the following games:

• FarCry5
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Ultra Settings: TAA/SMAA, Motion Blur Off
      • High Settings: TAA/SMAA, Motion Blur Off
• Battlefield V
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080
  • Pending benchmark: 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Ultra Settings: TAA/SMAA, Motion Blur Off
      • High Settings: TAA/SMAA, Motion Blur Off
• Division 2
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Ultra Settings: Vsync Off, AF: 16x, Depth of Field: On
      • High Settings: Vsync Off, AF: 8x, Depth of Field: On
• PUBG
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080
  • Pending benchmark: 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Ultra Settings: AA: Ultra, Shadows: Ultra, Textures: Ultra, Motion Blur: Off, Vsync: Off
      • High Settings: AA: High, Shadows: High, Textures: High, Motion Blur: Off, Vsync: Off
• Witcher3
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080
  • Pending benchmark: 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Ultra Settings
      • High Settings
• Hitman
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080
  • Pending benchmark: 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Max Settings: Ultra, FXAA, Texture Detail: High, AF: 16x, SSAO: On, DX12
      • High Settings: High, FXAA, Texture Detail: High, AF: 8x, SSAO: Off, DX12
• Mortal Kombat 11
  • Resolution/s benchmarked: 1920 x 1080
  • Pending benchmark: 2560 x 1440
    • Tests:
      • Max Settings: Ultra, FXAA, Texture Detail: High, AF: 16x, SSAO: On, DX12
      • High Settings: High, FXAA, Texture Detail: High, AF: 8x, SSAO: Off, DX12

Pending tasks: We still have yet to source a monitor that can natively output 3840 x 2160 so we can provide you with more reliable benchmark.

Battlefield V

Division 2

PUBG

The Witcher 3

Hitman

Mortal Kombat 11

A good card is also characterized by a good balance of performance and temperature. We don’t have the capability to fully measure its power draw, but judging from its performance, the magnitude of power it draws is expected to be very high, and the card must be able to compensate with its good thermal management features.

Based on our surface-level monitoring of its temperature, RTX 2080 Super has an average of 75°C at full load and 33°C when it’s idle.

We benchmarked the aforementioned games with the best of our ability and with the available tools we have at our disposal. If you’re looking for additional information such as power draw and extensive temperature test, I recommend that you visit the reviews from Back2Gaming.

Verdict

In most respects, it performs downright completely better as well compared to RTX 2060. We wish to reiterate that if you’re planning to upgrade from the aforementioned cards, you may grab one from NVIDIA’s new RTX Super line-up.

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super, at least for the reference card they sent us, offers a big leap in terms of performance versus GTX 1080 and GTX 1080Ti. While we concur that its performance difference over the RTX 2080 (it effectively replaced) is slim, the guarantee that it’s faster is dancing right in front of our faces.