Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti G-Sync HDR performance – A revolutionary upgrade over Pascal

Nvidia’s Turing architecture is more than just Pascal with RT Cores, and Tensor cores bolted to the edges of SMs, delivering several architectural improvements that are designed to provide increased performance over the company’s Pascal architecture. 

Perhaps one of the most under-reported improvements found in Nvidia’s Turing architecture is its use of a “Native HDR Display Pipeline”, which is designed to increase Turing’s performance when running HDR content. Simply put, Pascal was not designed with HDR in mind, delivering sub-par performance levels when running games with HDR enabled, especially when used in conjunction with G-Sync. 
  
Hardware Unboxed has dived a little deeper into Turing’s HDR performance, playing several popular games in SDR mode, with HDR enabled and with both G-Sync and HDR enabled. Sadly, we do not have a G-Sync HDR display in-house to verify these results at this time. 

With Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti, it was discovered that the performance impact of enabling HDR and G-Sync HDR was minimal, so low in fact that it would be impossible to notice in-game. Moving back to Nvidia’s Pascal-based Titan X (Pascal), Hardware Unboxed found that enabling HDR caused a notable drop to both average and minimum framerates. In Star Wars Battlefront II, enabling HDR and G-Sync resulted in a 12% decrease in average framerate, with larger drops being possible in other games. Please watch Hardware Unboxed’s video to see benchmark results for other games with G-Sync and HDR enabled.