Gaming Performance with Ray Tracing and DLSS
Watch Dogs Legions – Ray Tracing
In this chart we see performance suffers greatly and every individual frame becomes important for a decent gameplay experience. With our EVGA card coming in at 32 FPS average stock it’s pretty safe to call this one an un-playable experience. This is 6% slower than our MSI model which averages 34 FPS in this same scenario. Our EVGA model does manage to come out 10% ahead of our Turing card. With Ray Tracing enabled Watch Dogs Legions becomes a whole different ball game. Average frame rates fall precipitously, all below 40 FPS average. Modern video cards at this price range still struggle to push ray tracing without clever techniques to reduce the load.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood – Ray Tracing
Wolfenstein Young Blood proves to be a whole different ball game for us. Ray tracing in this title can be enabled at max settings without sacrificing your game play experience in any huge way. This can be clearly seen with our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition, coming in at 91 FPS average. Our small EVGA card manages to perform 8% better than this with an 99 FPS average. This is slightly behind theMSI card at 104 FPS average, or 5% faster. Of course, all things can be solved with a little extra voltage, right? With our overclock profile applied we get to 106 FPS average, clawing back the lead by a mere 2%.
Cyberpunk 2077 – Ray Tracing
This game is simply too much for these cards to handle ray tracing, without dropping the resolution down as we can see from our results. Turning ray tracing on made our average FPS dip from 48 FPS to 24 FPS, or a 67% drop in average frame rates. no card really came out too much ahead here, although our Turing card was really showing its age, as our EVGA card managed to average frame rates roughly 28% faster. When comparing to the more expensive MSI model things are really a wash, the performance is about 4% faster than our video card until we overclock which evens things out. All in all its just readily apparent that these cards do not have the muscle to really provide a good 1440p native ray traced experience.
Watch Dogs Legions – Ray Tracing & DLSS
In Watch Dogs Legions we see a great result from utilizing DLSS when pushing the settings up. Without DLSS our ray tracing performance was an un-playable slideshow. Yet once we enable DLSS we can see our cards almost all managing around a 50 fps Average. Our EVGA card is right at the threshold, with 51fps average. This was superior than the older NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition by 16% and only just behind our MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING X TRIO. The story here remains the same though, as after applying our overclock within Afterburner we gain just enough performance to overcome the MSI model. It’s not a massive victory, at 2% faster, but it certainly shows that this cooler is not a limiting factor. Out performing a card with that much more thermal capacity is a respectable result in our opinion.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood – Ray Tracing & DLSS
As we have stated before this is a title that truly does not need DLSS for these video cards. Even the older Turing model still manages to be playable without it. Nevertheless, this data is still valid from a comparison standpoint and so we set out to test. After gathering our data, we came back without much in the way of a surprise. We saw a huge improvement with DLSS on, gaining 35% more FPS on average than we had without it. This jump comes at almost no perceptible impact to your image quality, without pausing each scene and looking for the change. When taking a look at the differences between our sample card and its competition we see more of the same emerge. We trounce the more expensive Turing card while staying behind our MSI competition until we raise the clocks and voltages manually. The differences between our MSI card and our EVGA card at stock is a small 2% difference that does not allow any increase to image quality. Our Overclock does a decent job, again taking our EVGA card above and beyond the larger and more expensive MSI card.
Cyberpunk 2077 – Ray Tracing & DLSS
Again Cyberpunk 2077 reveals how demanding a title it is, as DLSS isn’t enough for us to comfortably enable Ultra Ray Tracing. While performance improved, its still just sluggish enough for it to be an unpleasant experience. Even though this single player title that does not require the highest frame rates. We again see our EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti XC GAMING come out ahead of the Turing card, this time by 14%. However we were unable to match the MSI card at stock and were forced to push the card with an overclock to surpass it. At stock we are a mere 5% behind the MSI model. With an OC push past it by 2%. This is a title in which we would recommended turning off ray tracing but enabling DLSS for high frame rates. For those looking to enjoy some Ray Traced goodness, you may need to drop down to 1080p with DLSS to make that happen.