NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super - How Super Is The Super RTX Release?
Previously we talked about the gaming CPU champion (price to performance wise) but what about the champion of the RTX Super series the Geforce RTX 2080 Super? Well we took it for a spin to find out how super is the RTX 2080 Super gaming card.
What’s under the hood of the GeForce RTX 2080 Super
From a technical point of view, the RTX 2080 Super is a small upgrade compared to the RTX 2080 and offers upgrades here and there like: several extra CUDA cores, slightly higher frequencies, a few additions on the memory side and a similar TDP, but there are no major differences. Well, we are already talking about an extremely powerful board, and the Super series does not come as a competitor, but a replacement, so any upgrade is welcome as long as it manages to maintain a competitive price and offer a good quality/performance. You can see the differences between the RTX 2080 and its Super version:
We have no more comparisons with percentages and all kinds of stuff like that from NVIDIA so let’s talk a little about my expectations regarding this board. Strictly, from the perspective of the specifications in the table above, probably the improvements made as performance will be small, below 15%, but that remains to be seen in the paragraph dedicated to the test results.
Design wise the GeForce RTX 2080 Super is a massive board, requiring a healthy cooling system to cope with it when running at full capacity. The design is similar to the one on the other boards in the Super series. The central part of the video card is chromed and has the RTX 2080 Super logo centered on it. On the side the same logo GEFORCE RTX completes the landscape, along with the two feeds, one 6-pin and another 8-pin.
So performance wise, the RTX 2080 Super is more of an overclocked version of the "non-super" variant and my assertion is supported by tests, as I compared the new board with another monster, the ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Strix Gaming. The test system consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor running on an ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard, 16GB RAM at 3600Mhz and a Samsung 512GB Evo-Pro SSD for game storage. Here are the results, both in gaming and synthetic benchmarks:
As you can see, the RTX 2080 Super scored a little over the RTX 2080 OC, the difference between the two being most often noticeable. Well, we talk about the Founders Edition, but there are some good results, because we compared it with a top model of the RTX 2080 which in Boost mode reaches frequencies up to 1950Mhz.
The differences made by the better specifications of the new board were seen in most of the tests run in games and in the synthetic tests, but there were differences so small that I do not think it is worth to call it an upgrade from the standard version, but more quickly, a refining of the original recipe after it has matured a little better and the world has become accustomed to the new technologies that made the RTX generation stand out from the moment of launch.
So is the GeForce RTX 2080 Super really that super?
The GeForce RTX 2080 Super is the latest entry in the NVIDIA Super trilogy and offers, like the rest of the series, increased performance compared to the base model. I liked it, of course, and from my conclusion is that this card is the perfect choice for 1440p resolution gaming on Ultra details and benefits such as RTX and DLSS are a real door opener to the world of 4K gaming.
Even though it's not an upgrade as big as the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super, NVIDIA thinks it chose to play the safe card with this release because too much performance improvement would have pushed the RTX 2080 Super too close RTX 2080 Ti while the price difference would have been too large. I see it as a 50/50 situation, in which NVIDIA had to choose who gets out of the game with this release. Either eliminate RTX 2080 through a revamped version of it, which they have done, either remove their dearest child, the RTX 2080 Ti and crown RTX 2080 Super as the new queen of gaming video cards.
If you do not have an RTX series board yet and you want very high performance at a good price, the RTX 2080 Super is a very good option and we were informed that not only this, but most of the RTX series video cards as well. Pre-built computers and laptops that come equipped with these cards will come with a gift bundle containing Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Control; two games that will test your video card with the help of Ray Tracing technology. If you are curious about the custom versions of the RTX 2080 Super or the componets we use on our test bench you can have a look below. Until the next time, have fun gaming!
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