NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Video Card Review

RTX 2080 SUPER Brings More Cores and Speed

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER just launched moments ago and so has our embargo on the performance numbers for this new desktop graphics card model. The GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER is replacement for the original RTX 2080. The good news is that the RTX 2080 SUPER Founders Edition is priced at $699, which is $100 less expensive than its predecessor.

There has been no shortage of graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA in the $299 to $499 price range, but this is the first new card in the $699+ range in many months. The 2080 SUPER is said to be up to 5% faster than the RTX 2080 FE or up to 10% faster than the RTX 2080 base models from board partners. That sounds confusing, but the original stock RTX 2080 FE was overclocked out of the box and had higher performance than many of the custom cards that came out. It is also faster than the mighty NVIDIA TITAN Xp and just slower than the $3,000 NVIDIA TITAN V.

What makes the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER faster? It uses the TU104-450 GPU with 3072 CUDA cores running at 1650 MHz base and 1815 MHz boost clock. So, you have 128 more CUDA cores than before and they are running faster. NVIDIA also beefed up the 8 GB of GDDR6 memory by clocking it up to 15.5 Gbps rather than 14 Gbps. This pushes the GDDR6 memory bandwidth on the 256-bit bus interface up to 496 Gbps from 448 Gbps. The 2080 SUPER brings more cores to the table and both the GPU and memory are clocked faster than before.

Other notable features is that the card is rated to deliver 11.2 TFLOPS of FP32 and INT32 compute power. The Rays Cast remains at 8 Giga Rays, but the Tensor FLOPS has improved to 89 TFLOPS.

The only downside to having more cores and higher clock speeds is that the power draw has gone up. NVIDIA rated the Total Graphics Power (TGP) of the RTX 2080 at 215 Watts and that has been bumped up to 250 Watts on the RTX 2080 SUPER.

We should also point out that no changes were made on the PCB and both share the same GPU cooler, so the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 SUPER are pretty much identical besides the nameplates. The good news here is that existing water blocks for the 2080 FE will bolt right onto the 2080 SUPER FE!

NVIDIA recommends a 650 Watt power supply for the 2080 SUPER FE and the card has one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector along the top edge.

NVIDIA says the RTX 2080 SUPER is ideal for 4K gaming as well as those looking to enable advanced gaming features like real-time ray tracing. It looks like ray-traced game titles are going to explode here soon with big name games like Cyberpunk: 2077, Watch Dogs: Legion and Atomic Heart all scheduled to appear soon. The extra CUDA cores and memory bandwidth will certainly help boost gaming performance.

Let’s move along to the benchmarks to see how these two new GPUs perform!