Nvidia has revealed their new Graphics card during their GeForce event a day before Gamescom. Most of the presentation they delivered during the event revolved around the Raytracing and improved anti-aliasing technique put forth by the Turing architecture. They showcased the differences that Raytracing produces in the image quality of the games. We did not have much to compare the new RTX lineup and the GTX 10 series Graphics card because Nvidia did not compare the respective Graphics cards side by side and rather focused most of their presentation on the new features. The new features include the raytracing abilities put forth by the addition of the new RT cores on the chip and DLSS image enhancement abilities brought by the inclusion of the Tensor cores introduced by the Volta architecture.
Raytracing and DLSS
We have already explained both these features in a separate piece do check it out if you want to learn about these exclusive RTX series features. The question raised by many people about the direct comparison of the Pascal series and Turing series has finally been answered by Nvidia’s director of technical marketing, Tom Peterson. He joined HotHardware on their 2.5 geek podcast and talked about the details Nvidia deliberately or unknowingly did not give during their presentation. It can be argued that the excitement and joy on achieving the “holy grail” of Graphics Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang had may be one of the reasons why they relied mostly on Raytracing.
2.5 Geek
Tom Peterson talked about the CUDA cores, Tensor cores, RT cores and the supersampling technique that will be used to convert low-resolution image to a higher resolution image. Most importantly he admitted that they could have done a better job in explaining and highlighting the performance gains of the new GPUs. Nvidia mostly talked about the features and bluntly neglected the performance gains the new GPUs will have over the Pascal series in older games which cannot benefit from DLSS or Raytracing.
They released a somewhat deluded chart of the performance difference between GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 in different games at 4K but did not specify the detailed Graphics settings. In that chart, it can be seen that the RTX 2080 is almost two times faster than the GTX 1080 at 4K. Tom also said candidly that he thinks the RTX 2080 can outperform GTX 1080Ti in some cases, but he could not say for sure.
35 to 45 percent performance boost
During the interview, he was asked about the expectations of the gamers with the new Graphics card. He did try to be clear but hesitantly said that the performance differences between the old and the new GPUs are roughly 35 to 45 percent. He added that the relative performance difference between the GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 is not as huge as the difference between the GTX 1080Ti and the RTX 2080Ti. If the user is not bottlenecked with the CPU usage, then the numbers mentioned above are easily achievable.
“I think we could’ve done a little bit better on during the public announcement. Turing is a beast. It’s going to improve the gaming experience on old games significantly, and it’s going to rock it when you adopt new technology…”
“We did share some data that showed a bunch of games, and you’ll see the perf [performance] roughly somewhere between 35 to 45 percent better at roughly the same generation. So, 1080 Ti to 2080 Ti and of course that’s going to vary based on the game and based on the setting.”
Transcript by wccftech.com
The increased performance difference is between the RTX 2080Ti, and the GTX 1080Ti can be explained by the CUDA core delta between these Graphics cards is more than the CYDA core delta between the GTX 1070 and RTX 2070 or the GTX 1080 and the RTX 2080. The increased cores do help in cramming in more performance.
Overclocking
When he was asked about the overclocking yields of the Graphics cards he seems pretty confident about it, though he did not dive into the details. He said that he had seen many Graphics cards at clock speeds as high as 2.1GHz. We can at least expect that Founder’s edition Graphics cards to be highly overclockable and hence the dual fan design.
Price
Even though the performance difference to be expected is around 50 percent, the price difference between the Graphics cards is more than double. The GTX 1080Ti on sale can be grabbed at around 550 dollars while the Founder’s edition RTX 2080Ti will hit very hard on your wallet with 1199 dollars price tag. For the consumers who want to upgrade to an RTX 2080, the price difference is not huge, but the performance at large is fairly similar to the GTX 1080Ti with a price tag of 799 dollars. All in all, these are only numbers we cannot say for sure about which series should let you go for, but we have the list of the best Graphics cards of 2018 yet.