Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Review

Under the Hood

Whenever a new product is launched there is always a lot of convoluted and complicated stuff going on under the hood which sounds spectacular to the manufacturers and is of great interest to those with an extremely technical background, but isn’t always clear to the end user what real world benefits it will bring. In the world of CPUs a lot of those benefits can be found in specific applications. When it comes to graphics cards however, for most of us it boils down to “do my games run smoother?”. But we endeavour to cater to everyone here, so bear with us whilst we give you a quick run down over the next few pages of what’s going on under the hood. If you merely want some graphs then you know where the drop down page selector is, and we’ll meet you on page seven.

nVidia’s Pascal architecture has been with us since mid-2016, giving Nvidia over two years to design and build something greater, promising consumers an enormous leap in graphics performance. What wasn’t expected was Turing, the graphics core to combine all of Nvidia’s graphics IP into a single package, combining traditional shader compute with the company’s AI-centric Tensor cores alongside bespoke Ray Tracing Acceleration hardware. With Turing, Nvidia promises to make all forms of compute relevant for gaming graphics, taking the GPU industry in a brave new direction. 

With Turing, it is almost easier to list what hasn’t changed since Pascal. Nvidia has implemented a new core design, moved to GDDR6 memory, added support for new display standards like VirtualLink, implemented an enhanced video encode/decoder and has even dropped a “Native HDR Display Pipeline” into the mix. That list didn’t even mention the Ray Tracing and AI technologies that Nvidia has built into Turing, that’s how much of a technological leap Turing is over Pascal.  
  

  
As you can see, the pricing is fairly steep, but around the mark of the current range of cards at the top end. The 2080 has a UK MSRP of £749 whilst the Ti version comes in at a whopping £1099. At current conversion rates the Ti should be £989, but that’s the way it always is. If you’re going to the USA soon, pack a spare suitcase.