After much teasing and waiting, the reviews for nVidia’s RTX cards are now available, which means we can finally properly evaluate how the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti stack up against the prior generation.
The Bad
Now, nVidia had promised us a gamer’s paradise with the new RTX cards. These cards had raytracing, and raytracing was the “Holy Grail” of gaming! Realistic shadows, realistic reflections, realistic refractions! Games so real you could see slow-mo explosions in the eyes of soldiers! Wow! But wait, there is more! Artificial Intelligence that allowed your heavenly cards to give superior anti-aliasing at a fraction of the performance cost! Amazing! A new era of gaming was promised by nVidia, and all you needed was $1200 to join.
All enormous promises fail. Politicians’ vows just before an election, your dad hinting at a trip to Disneyland if you get good grades, and nVidia’s promised new era of gaming… all share the same fundamental characteristic: It is just empty talk. Giving graphics cards a couple of new features is not going to radically change anything, and we should have known better. nVidia said the same about PhysX, and where did that go? A dozen games, none of them released in 2018. And remember HairWorks? Yes, all enormous promises fail.
每一个评论的哀叹fact that there is no way of testing the new raytracing features, as no game supports it. Battlefield V was the biggest demo for raytracing, but it is not out. No other game is close to release, so all you can do with your new $1200 toy (for now) is to check out Final Fantasy XV demos for some fancy anti-aliasing.
The Good
Setting aside the much-hyped-but-untestable features, we can look at the traditional performance of the new cards. The new RTX 2080 is about 10% better than the GTX 1080 Ti, and costs about $100 (or 15%) more. That makes it slightly overpriced in comparison, though many would say that “slightly” is not the word to use for a card that costs $800.
The RTX 2080 Ti is much more powerful, slightly beating nVidia’s $3000 Titan V (and, unlike the Titan V, the RTX 2080 Ti can be run in SLI). Beating the Titan V makes the 2080 Ti the most powerful single card that you can buy, beating all cheaper competition by ~20-30%! This is a card that can hit 80+FPS in Witcher 3 on 4k!
But it does cost $1200, which is as much as a complete (and powerful) computer, so we absolutely do not recommend it for anyone other than the extremely wealthy.
How We Will Proceed
Because of the extreme prices of these two new cards, only the most expensive tiers are going to see any changes. The RTX 2080 is a good alternative to the GTX 1080 Ti, so we will add it to the Exceptional tier. We remove the GTX 1070 Ti x2, as the price and performance makes it unattractive when compared to the new cards. The Titan Xp (finally!) gets retired, to be replaced by the superior GTX 2080 Ti.
The details of all changes are as follows:
- We’ve added the RTX 2080 to the Exceptional tier
- We’ve removed the GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1070 Ti x2 from the Enthusiast tier
- We’ve added the RTX 2080 Ti, as well as GTX 1080 Ti x2, to the Enthusiast tier
- We’ve removed GTX 1080 Ti x2 from the Extremist tier
- We’ve added RTX 2080 x2 to the Extremist tier
- We’ve removed both GTX 1080 Ti x2 and Titan Xp x2 from the Monstrous tier
- We’ve added RTX 2080 x2 and RTX 2080 Ti x2 to the Monstrous tier
These changes will come to the various country versions of the chart as the new cards become available in different regions.
Final Note
These new cards are horrendously expensive, and are targeted at the fabulously wealthy gamer who plays games on $2000 4K 144Hz screens. For normal mortals with humbler wallets and 1080p/1440p screens, we are better served by lesser cards that are much cheaper, but still provide great performance. We at Logical Increments encourage you to make wiser purchasing decisions.
看价格的e new cards, one might wonder why nVidia is allowed to get away with murder? The answer is obvious and sad: The competition. Or, to be a bit more accurate: The “competition”. AMD’s options in the high-end GPU segment are pathetic, barely able to offer half (half!) of nVidia’s power. AMD took years and years before it Ryzen-ed up its CPUs, so how much longer do we need to wait for AMD to make high-end GPUs that are worth considering?
Oh, and sorry about that Disneyland trip. Maybe next year?