Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti graphics card promises unparalleled power for those who can afford it.
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at a glance
How powerful is the RTX 2080 Ti? The RTX 2080 Ti is the most powerful graphics card in Nvidia's RTX 20 series and is primed to deliver unmatched performance at 4K resolution.When does the RTX 2080 Ti come out? 20 September 2018.
How much does the RTX 2080 Ti cost? At launch, the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Ti will cost you a hefty $1,899.
What is the RTX 2080 Ti?
Announced in advance of Gamescom 2018, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the flagship graphics card of Nvidia's RTX 20 line. Taking cues from its predecessor, the GTX 1080 Ti, it promises unparalleled performance, as long as you're willing to pay for it.
Nvidia's pitch with the RTX 2080 Ti leans heavily on the new Turing graphics architecture underpinning all RTX 20 series cards. Turing represents a significantly different focus from that of the Pascal architecture powering the previous GTX 10 graphics cards. Rather than a raw increase in clock speeds and RAM sizes, Turing hangs its hat on two core technologies: real-time ray tracing and Tensor Cores.
In essence, real-time ray tracing deals with illumination and perspective, calculating how the positioning of different light sources impacts the appearance of objects in a scene. Compared to the rasterisation technique currently used for most real-time lighting calculations, ray tracing delivers a far more realistic representation of lighting and colour.
Tensor Cores are a little more focused in their capabilities. Most commonly seen in neural networks, they offer specialised performance on machine-learning tasks and artificial intelligence routines. For games, Nvidia is promising that they'll enable enhanced graphics-processing techniques like higher-quality anti-aliasing and up-ressing.
What features does the RTX 2080 Ti support?
Along with the new features offered by Turing, the RTX 2080 Ti retains many of the core capabilities introduced in the previous GTX 10 series. The most noteworthy are listed below:
- Real-time ray tracing
- VirtualLink for single-USB VR connections
- Tensor Cores for enhanced AI
- Nvidia NVLink for faster multi-GPU configurations
- Nvidia Ansel
- HDCP 2.2
- OpenGL 4.5
- Display Port 1.4a with support for 8K resolution
- HMDI 2.0b
- G-Sync
- Variable Rate Shading
- Multi-view rendering
- VRWorks Audio
- Nvidia Shadowplay
- DirectX 12
How powerful is the RTX 2080 Ti?
Properly assessing the performance of a graphics card requires putting it through its paces across a wide variety of games and configuration settings. With the release of the RTX 2080 Ti still a little way off, we haven't had a chance to conduct any hands-on testing and as such its practical performance remains unknown.
That said, we can get a general idea of the RTX 2080 Ti's capabilities by looking at its specs and considering the metrics Nvidia itself is touting. For instance, Nvidia claims RTX 20 cards can deliver up to 6 times the performance of their GTX 10 series counterparts, which if true would represent a tremendous increase in both visual fidelity and responsiveness. The catch there is that such massive performance gains require games to specifically take advantage of Turing's real-time ray tracing capabilities. Whether the performance difference will be quite so noticeable for games that don't support real-time ray tracing remains to be seen.
From the specs alone, the gap between the RTX 2080 Ti and its predecessor the GTX 1080 Ti isn't quite so enormous:
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Product Name | Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB |
| Model | RTX 2080 Ti | GTX 1080 Ti |
| Base clock speed | 1350MHz | 1480MHz |
| Boost clock speed | 1635MHz | 1582MHz |
| Memory | 11GB | 11GB |
| Memory speed | 14Gbps | 11Gbps |
| Memory bus | 352-bit | 352-bit |
As you can see, Nvidia has only made slight increases to the clock speed and kept to the 11GB of RAM included in the GTX 1080 Ti. The biggest change is the switch from GDDR5X memory to the faster GDDR6 kind and while this does result in considerably higher memory bandwidth, the impact of this increase on actual game performance is as yet unclear.
RTX 2080 Ti availability and price
The RTX 2080 Ti was among the first RTX 20 series cards to hit the market, launching worldwide on 20 September 2018. Here in Australia, the Founders Edition version of the card clocks in at $1,899.
RTX 2080 Ti specs
- Base clock speed
- 1350MHz
- Boost clock speed
- 1635MHz
- Memory
- 11GB GDDR6
- Memory speed
- 14Gbps
- Memory bus
- 352-bit
- Card length
- 266.74mm
- Card width
- Dual slot
- Card height
- 115.7mm
- Power draw
- 260W
- Recommended system power
- 650W
- Power connectors
- 2 * 8-pin
- No. HDMI ports
- 1
- No. Display Ports
- 1
- No. DVI ports
- 0
- DirectX support
- 12