GeForce RTX 2080 beats 1080 performance on modern games by up to 50 percent, NVIDIA says

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 is shaping up to be a monster, even with games that don't take advantage of its more advanced features.

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (Image credit: Windows Central)

NVIDIA this week had PC gamers salivating with the launch of its new GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs. But while much of the presentation was rightly focused on the absurdly gorgeous visuals enabled by the cards' ray tracing tech and Turing architecture, NVIDIA didn't initially offer up much information on how the GPUs would stack up on current titles that may not take advantage of the more eye-catching bells and whistles.

Now, that company has revealed how the standard RTX 2080 stacks up against its predecessor, the GTX 1080, in current games. And the results look pretty darn promising (opens in new tab).

RTX 2080 performance

According to NVIDIA's numbers, the new Turing-based cards will deliver performance gains of up to 50 percent over the GTX 1080 in games like Final Fantasy XV, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. That's with standard gameplay at 4K resolution without tapping into Turing's new deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) tech, which the company describes thusly:

DLSS takes advantage of our tensor cores' ability to use AI. In this case it's used to develop a neural network that teaches itself how to render a game. It smooths the edges of rendered objects and increases performance.

Once DLSS is enabled, performance far exceeds the games with standard settings, topping double the performance over the 1080 in several games.

All of that raw performance has some serious benefits for games currently on the market. In a separate slide, NVIDIA says that the GeForce RTX series can achieve framerates well above the usual benchmark of 60 FPS in games like Resident Evil 7, Far Cry 5, and Destiny 2. Others stand out even more, with 93 FPS in Call of Duty: WWII and 84 in Battlefield 1. All of these framerates were achieved at 4K resolution with HDR.

Turing vs. Pascal

All of this is to say that, anyone upgrading from a GTX 1080 will see significant performance gains right away. Where things will get very interesting, however, is when we start seeing titles that take advantage of the gorgeous ray tracing effects enabled by the new cards, which make the lighting in every scene look much more natural.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series is up for preorder now (opens in new tab) starting at $599 from NVIDIA itself and a range of third-party manufacturers.

See at NVIDIA (opens in new tab)

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

13 Comments
  • I would wait to buy. They sometimes bundle games with these cards after a few months.
  • And what about the 1080ti? Isn't the 1080 alot slower?
  • Yeah but a more sensible comparison to the 2080 is the 1080. Needless to say the 2080 is likely still better than the 1080 Ti
  • The 1080ti should be compared with the 2080ti not the 2080.
  • Got me that 2080Ti on preorder, counting down the days now!
  • You should always wait for benchmarks I hear it performed really bad with RTX on in shadow of tomb raider. just saying..
  • You don't need RTX on though to get blistering performance. Sure, RTX is the big deal, but can you really see people in competitive games caring about realistic lighting when they set the graphics to low to get maximum FPS?
  • Ah.......no.
    This was a Pre-Pre-Alpha SoTR demo just to show it worked at all that they were playing using Alpha nVidia drivers.
    Nothing had been optimized at all for it as the developers had only had a few days to get something running for the show.
    Expect substantially better performance in a few months once the devs and nVidia have had a chance to optimize both the games and drivers. This happens any time a big change like this happens. I remember when "Programable Shaders" first showed up in GPU's and the same issues happened. Nothing was optimized and nobody had it in their hands long enough to make it work correctly. Now the entire industry is based upon that paradigm and it has been tuned finely by all. Give it some time. By the time these become generally available I expect much, MUCH better performance across the board. The DLSS is the real key here for existing games and that is not yet supported by many of the listed games. It will take time is all. Patches will come out for existing games and new games will include support natively. I am wondering what AMD is going to do now however. Microsoft has published the RDX12 extensions to DirectX 12 already and the entire industry appears ready to support it (both content creators and game developers) so they better have something.
  • That's odd as I had read that Shadow of the Tomb Raider was actually slower on a 2080 than on a 1080Ti!!?!
  • That was with Ray Tracing rendering - a completely different way to render over old rasterization techniques. You will more than certainly be able to play at much higher framerates using the now "old school" rasterization techniques.
  • RTX affects frame rate, that's just how it is right now. You can either have new hotness and less frames it seems or just blow the doors off without it on.
  • Obviously, not enough data to really analyze. I've no doubt the 2080 will compare well with even the 1080TI on current titles. I also understand a 50% increase wouldn't alone warrant buying a card that costs 40% more than the current 1080! However, everything banks on that RTX engine, and if DLSS is something supported in most titles moving forward. For me, moving from a 1060 to an RTX2080 will be heaven though, and I know I'm paying an early adopter tax. I believe in the vision for real time ray tracing - and I'm an image quality guy.
  • Completely agree. I've got a 1080 Ti right now so I'm hesitant to upgrade just yet because RTX will certainly be a work in progress. But, having been at the event and seen it first hand, the technology blows me away. Not every game is about kill death 176 FPS I MUST WIN. There are so many stunning games out there that RTX will transform.