Nvidia has announced its next generation of graphics cards. Meet the Turing family, which takes over from the Pascal GTX 10-series cards that wowed us in 2016 and 2017.
The pick for many of you will be the Nvidia RTX 2080, the top card in the lineup bar the RTX 2080 Ti, which comes with a fairly intimidating price rise.
This is a rather more specific generational shift than we saw with the Nvidia GTX 1080. The new architecture focuses on real-time ray tracing and AI-based graphical enhancement.
Game engines will need to use these features to make Nvidia’s claims of “6x performance” increases anything like a reality. But real-time ray tracing will certainly have a big effect on the kinds of improved graphical effects we’ll see in games over the next 18 months.
Let’s compare the Nvidia RTX 2080 to the GTX 1080 to see how excited we should really be.
Nvidia RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 – Overview
Time flies when you spend half your free time looking for a graphics card deal, apparently. Nvidia announced the GTX 1080 way back in May 2016; it went on sale towards the end of that month.
The Nvidia RTX 2080 was announced more than two years later on 20 August 2018, as part of the Gamescom conference. It will be on sale on September 20th.
Nvidia says it’s worked on the Turing architecture for 10 years. An important element of this new style of GPU, the Tensor core, was also used in 2017’s Titan V and Tesla V100 cards.
The V100 is a £10,000 card intended for engineers and data scientists. This RTX generation sees a tasty trickle-down of technology, which before now was just too expensive for most of us to afford.
Nvidia RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 – Price
Nvidia’s RTX 2080 is far from an affordable component, though. The overclocked Founders Edition of the RTX 2080 costs £749/$799, and there’s a £649 “RRP” for future third-party cards.
This is significantly more expensive than the initial £619 price of the GTX 1080 back in May 2016. It’s much closer to the original cost of the GTX 1080 Ti.
At the RTX 2080’s launch, online prices for the GTX 1080 were down to the £450-500.
The hope now is that we won’t see another shortage-induced price hike over the coming month, caused by Bitcoin miners hogging the supply.
Nvidia RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 – Specs
| RTX 2080 | GTX 1080 | |
| Generation | Turing | Pascal |
| Announcement | August 2018 | May 2016 |
| Cuda cores | 2944 | 2560 |
| Tensor cores | 384 | 0 |
| Base speed | 1515 | 1607 |
| Boost speed | 1710 (1800 Founders) | 1733 |
| RAM | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR5X |
| Memory speed | 14Gbps | 10Gbps |
| Memory bandwidth | 448 GB/sec | 320 GB/sec |
| Power draw | 215W | 180W |
| Rec. system power | 650W | 500W |
Assess the RTX 2080 by the same metrics we might use for the GTX 1080 and it doesn’t sound like that impressive an upgrade. You get 15% more CUDA cores and 40% faster memory speed.
However, Nvidia claims a performance improvement of “up to 6x”. We have to dig a little deeper to discover what this really means.
CUDA cores have been around since 2006. The RTX range brings new Tensor, RT Core and Turing SM components into mainstream cards, and these are what will really boost this generation’s functional power.
Nvidia’s two highlighted elements for Turing cards are ‘AI’ and ‘real-time ray tracing’.
Ray tracing is the tracking of beams of light. It allows for much more realistic-looking shadows and reflections in particular. In a rendered scene with ray tracing, it isn’t only the objects that are rendered, but the light being bounced around and off them.
Consider, for example, what a textured metallic surface does to light. Or the subtler effect a glass box has on a light source. You might think of it as transparent, but it will still cast a shadow.
Unreal Engine 4’s team posted one of the clearest demonstrations of real-time ray tracing in action in a Star Wars-inspired video from March 2018. It’s most useful for accurate rendering of reflections across complicated surfaces, in a manner that could make video game graphics look real. Or at least closer to the quality of a current CGI-rendered movie or game cut-scene.
Ray tracing is extremely power-intensive, and the new RTX hardware uses ‘deep learning’ to cut some of this down. You could also interpret this as cheating our way to full ray tracing, getting the same perceived effect with less power.
Unreal Engine 4, Frostbite and the 4A Engine, as used in Metro Exodus, have already been used to demonstrate this tech in action. It seems far more obvious an improvement in reflections than shadows.
However, because of the somewhat specific nature of these changes, the difference in performance in existing games may not be as significant as you expect. This may be the reason Nvidia didn’t show any traditional benchmark results to highlight the power of the RTX 2080.
The GTX 1080 can still play many of today’s games at a 4K resolution, at 60fps – although it doesn’t quite manage this with titles such as GTA V.
Nvidia RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 – Design
Nvidia has switched up the design of its Founders Edition RTX 2080, perhaps in response to criticisms of the classic model. Instead of the single fan ‘blower’ layout of the original GTX 1080, you now get two fans.
This should make the RTX 2080 much quieter, giving you fewer reasons to wait for third-party models. That said, you may well be able to save some money if you wait.
Nvidia RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 – Early verdict
Until we test the RTX 2080 we can’t call a clear winner. But if even a fraction of Nvidia’s performance claims ring true it should be an excellent card that’ll play pretty much any game with ease. The 1080 is still an impressive beast however. If you just have a 1080p monitor then it remains a solid choice, especially with the discounted price tag.
(trustedreviews.com, http://bit.ly/2Ln0pII)