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Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: rasterisation analysis

Rise/ Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3

Richard Leadbetter avatar
Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry
Updated on
41 comments

Our tests continue with another batch of titles - Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. Our test system for all benches across this entire review consists 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. A Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used to keep the power-hungry 8700K in check.

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 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-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). 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.

We use the FCAT system for analysing GPU performance. A coloured border is overlaid in each rendered frame, the video feed from the GPU is captured and the files are then scanned with our own proprietary software. The captures are distilled down into text files which are used to dynamically generate the data presented on this page, and they're also used for studying performance in context in our video reviews.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Likely to be a legacy title in our line-up for quite a while, this game isn't particularly happy running on the latest Nvidia cards. Performance is fine, though gains over the standard RTX 2080 are unexceptional. However, it bears repeating again that this is comparing a reference clocked 2080 Super with a factory overclocked 2080 FE.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Very High, SMAA

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs on a more modern iteration of Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes' Foundation Engine and features a best-in-class DirectX 12 implementation. However, gains at 1080p are extremely limited up against the old RTX 2080 FE card, while the advantage delivered at higher resolutions is in expected the five per cent ballpark.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Highest, TAA

The Witcher 3

This is a tricky one. Our gallop through Novigrad city hits a CPU bottleneck when our overclocked Core i7 8700K is paired with more powerful graphics cards. In fact, the more powerful your GPU, the more likely you are to bump into CPU limitations at 1080p and sometimes even at 1440p too, so don't be surprised or shocked by lowest one per cent scores dropping beneath less capable cards - that's all about random CPU stutter that can creep into the results. The CPU bottleneck explains why a 2080 Super can match 2080 Ti at 1080p, when results at 1440p and 4K show the Nvidia flagship running 18 to 22 per cent faster.

Witcher 3: Ultra, Post-AA, No Hairworks

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Analysis