Conclusion
In this review, we wanted to re-visit GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card performance in games now that it is 2020. We did this with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC Edition based video card. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was released in September of 2018 and has sat unchallenged for a year and a half now. In that time, newer games have been released and we needed to see if it can still hold its own at 4K and 1440p resolutions in these games.
To accomplish this ASUS sent us their ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti O11G GAMING video card. This is ASUS’s top-tier, highest-end, ROG STRIX series video cards based on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC Edition has a very high factory overclock and is geared for overclocking. It allowed us to test a high-level of out-of-box performance and overclock the video card to push performance as fast as we could make it. It isn’t cheap though, it is currently $1279.99 on Amazon.
Since there really isn’t any comparison to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti we used an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition and AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. These video cards at least gave us a baseline of performance and something to compare the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti with so that we could see how much faster it is. We also tested in both 4K and 1440 resolutions at maxed-out graphics settings. We even enabled NVIDIA Ray Tracing in the games that support it to so we can see if the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is able to handle that today.
Performance Goals
We went into this review knowing the ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti O11G GAMING would dominate performance. There isn’t anything else to compare it with that performs similarly. AMD has nothing at the moment that compares. So, we knew this was a given, and isn’t really what the review is about.
Instead, when looking at performance our goal was to first see how much faster it was with the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and Radeon RX 5700 XT. Then it was to see how high we could run game settings at 4K and 1440p. We wanted to know if it can “max out” game settings at 1440p or 4K. Ray Tracing also needed to be tested. Newer games also had to be used, newer than 2018.
How Fast Is It
To no one’s surprise, the ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti O11G GAMING was indeed the fastest video card of the bunch. According to our performance testing at 4K and 1440p the video card was in the upper 20% range of performance magnitude faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE. We saw performance from 26-29% on average over that of the GeForce RTX 2080 FE. There was one exception, Ghost Recon Breakpoint saw a 40%+ increase at 4K, but that was because the RTX 2080 FE was memory bottlenecked.
You also have to keep in mind that the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition does have a higher boost clock than a regular model. It more closely represents a factory overclocked GeForce RTX 2080. Therefore, at close to 30% faster, the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti offers a decent boost in performance at 4K and 1440p.
Playable Experience
In many situations it was the difference between playable and not playable. The ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti offered a playable experience at 4K, and the RTX 2080 FE did not. Even at 1440p with some games at their maxed-out settings the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti offered playable settings versus not playable on the RTX 2080 FE.
The difference in performance between the Radeon RX 5700 XT was even more paramount. The Radeon RX 5700 XT seemed to trail the GeForce RTX 2080 FE in every game at every setting. It did quite poorly at high settings in some games with maxed out graphics settings. Therefore, the ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti O11G GAMING offered an even higher percentage of performance faster than it.
The Radeon RX 5700 XT sadly is AMD’s fastest video card at the moment, and it really is not holding up too well in today’s latest games with maxed-out settings. It is also in no way a 4K video card, it offers a weak level of gameplay experience for 4K gaming. The GeForce RTX 2080 FE just simply does better than it at 4K.