Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
There was an insane amount of buzz surrounding the launch of NVIDIA’s Turing-based RTX GPUs last fall, but the astoundingly high prices of the graphics cards put a damper on PC enthusiast excitement. Nearly a year later, competitor AMD has launched the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT to compete against NVIDIA’s high-end lineup, driving down the cost-to-performance ratio. NVIDIA responded by releasing new “Super” variants of last year’s models, with the newest being the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. It launched yesterday and will carry a retail price of $699.
Thanks to a lack of competition in the high-end segment, NVIDIA was able to take it easy with the Pascal-based GPUs they launched in 2016. AMD had nothing ready to compete with the 2018 Turing-based lineup of GeForce RTX GPUs like the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080. This changed when AMD officially announced the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT at E3 2019. AMD’s new GPUs were, at worst, competitive with NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, and in many cases, exceeded performance expectations, all while arriving at lower prices points.
NVIDIA responded to the RX 5700 launch by releasing the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super. These refreshed GPUs were clocked higher and have much faster memory than their predecessors. In particular, the RTX 2070 Super offered a level of performance in line with the $799 RTX 2080 for a price of $499. Fans were excited to see how the RTX 2080 Super would perform and the card is now in the hands of reviewers and on store shelves.
With the benchmarks now in, it would appear that the new NVIDIA GPU does not offer as big a performance jump as its lesser siblings. In most cases, the RTX 2080 Super is only 5-10% faster than the vanilla RTX 2080 in most benchmarks. Many were hoping it could close the gap on the absurdly expensive RTX 2080 TI, but it is not to be. Still, it does offer better performance for your dollar than you were getting a month ago, so the news is not all bad. Check out the links below for a sample of the tech world’s opinion on the RTX 2080 Super.
RTX 2080 Super Review at Eurogamer
RTX 2080 Super Review at Guru3D
RTX 2080 Super Review at TechSpot
RTX 2080 Super Review at PC Perspective
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