Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition review: A modest upgrade to a powerful GPU

Nvidia’s $700 GeForce RTX 2080 Super is the second-fastest graphics card ever launched, a screaming piece of package that chews by video games even at 4K decision. You’d be very comfortable shopping for it. But it simply doesn’t really feel as, properly, tremendous as its lower-priced siblings.

The GeForce RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super burst onto the scene early in July and altered your entire high-end graphics card panorama, rendering a number of different GPUs immediately out of date. The $400 RTX 2060 Super delivered efficiency on par with the unique $500 RTX 2070, whereas the brand new $500 RTX 2070 Super got here inside spitting distance of the unique $700 RTX 2080. It wasn’t sufficient to kill AMD’s Radeon revival, however the first two Nvidia Super GPUs lived up to their title.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Super? It’s a little bit sooner than its vanilla namesake—however solely by a hair. The beastly GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has nothing to worry.

Brad Chacos/IDG

GeForce RTX 2080 Super: Specs and options

The GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition we’re testing in the present day sticks to reference speeds and can set you again $699, Nvidia’s MSRP for this GPU. That’s in distinction to the unique RTX 2080 FE, which commanded a $100 worth premium over MSRP and included a delicate overclock. Customized variations of the RTX 2080 Super can even be obtainable in the present day by Nvidia board companions like EVGA, Asus, and Gigabyte.

Speaking of reference specs, let’s have a look at the core GPU itself. Here’s how the GeForce RTX 2080 Super stacks up in opposition to the unique RTX 2080 and the last-gen GTX 1080:

Nvidia

The GeForce RTX 2080 Super is in a barely completely different state of affairs than the opposite Super playing cards. While the RTX 2060 Super shifted to a extra totally enabled model of the TU106 GPU to obtain its larger efficiency, and the RTX 2070 Super made the leap from TU106 to a cut-down model of the stronger TU104 GPU discovered within the unique RTX 2080, that unique RTX 2080 already deployed a principally maxed-out model of TU104. Nvidia determined in opposition to shifting the 2080 Super up to a cut-down model of the mammoth TU102 GPU discovered within the RTX 2080 Ti. It’s as a substitute utilizing a full-fat model of TU104 with 48 streaming multiprocessors, up from 46 SMs within the unique. For comparability, the RTX 2060 and 2070 Super fashions added 4 SMs every to obtain their giant efficiency jumps.

Adding extra cores isn’t the one software in Nvidia’s arsenal. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super is the primary client graphics card to ship with GDDR6 reminiscence clocked at a speedy 15.5Gb/s as a substitute of the usual 14Gbps. That boosts the general reminiscence bandwidth from the 448GB/s obtainable in different GeForce RTX and Radeon RX 5700 GPUs all the way in which to 496GB/s, which can assist increase efficiency in some eventualities. The firm additionally elevated clock speeds throughout the board with the RTX 2080 Super. 

Nvidia says the cumulative tweaks assist the RTX 2080 Super carry out up to 10 % sooner than the unique RTX 2080, and that it’s about 6 % sooner on common. The reference-spec RTX…