Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: rasterisation analysis

Crysis 3, Far Cry 5, Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Updated on 26 Sep 2019

Our relentless stress-testing of intensive games continues with the legendary Crysis 3 and two recent Ubisoft releases: Far Cry 5 and Ghost Recon Wildlands. Our test system remains the same obviously, consisting of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. To ensure that the power-hungry 8700K doesn't overheat, a Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get the basics: a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-fat Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in sync with the video, even if you skip around or adjust the playback speed. Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

All performance data is derived from video captures of each graphics card - no internal metrics here, the gold standard in analysis comes from measuring what's actually emerging from the video output of the GPU.

Crysis 3

Six years on from launch, the searing climax of Crysis 3's Welcome to the Jungle level remains a crushing test of graphics hardware. It's also an important reflection of in-game performance in older engines that don't include optimisations for newer graphics cards, to the point that some GTX 10-series graphics cards performed better here than their RTX 20-series equivalents at the same price point. That means it's raw horsepower that is the biggest difference-maker, and here the RTX 2080 Super's improved specs do provide a boost. The 2080 Super gets a six point advantage at 1440p over the non-Super card, rising to seven per cent at 4K. It is worth pointing out again that the original RTX cards did come with a slight overclock applied which isn't present on the new Super cards, so performance comparisons reference to reference will be a little broader than this. Bringing AMD into the conversation for a moment, the RTX 2080 Super leads the Radeon 7 by fourteen per cent at 1440p but only half that at 4K.

Crysis 3: Very High, SMAA T2X

Far Cry 5

The Radeon 7 and RTX 2080 are within eight per cent of each other in this test at 1440p with the new RX 5700 XT surprisingly close to AMD's top card. The RTX 2080 Super shows quite small improvements comparatively, carving out a four per cent lead over the RTX 2080 and a 12 per cent lead over the Radeon 7 at 1440p. For 4K, the gap between the new 2080 Super and the Radeon 7 narrows to six per cent, allowing Nvidia to retake the lead in what had been a dead heat. If you're wondering about the parity in results at 1080p between 2080, 2080S and 2080 Ti, welcome to the world of being CPU-limited - even with a 4.7GHz all-core turbo on an i7 8700K paired with 3400MHz DDR4. Any small variance you see there is all about margin of error.

Far Cry 5: Ultra, TAA

Ghost Recon Wildlands

The ultra preset in Ghost Recon Wildlands turns the mild-mannered open world game into a fully-fledged destroyer of gaming GPUs, especially when you look at 4K performance. The RTX 2080 Super handles the challenge a touch better than its predecessor, opening up a five per cent advantage at 1440p and a seven per cent lead at ultra HD. The new second-place Nvidia card is still around 15 per cent behind the RTX 2080 Ti, though, so even overclocking the Super won't be enough to go up a performance tier in this case. We'll be looking at full-blooded overclocking a couple of pages on.