Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: rasterisation analysis

Strange Brigade, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Updated on 26 Sep 2019

Sometimes a PC hardware reviewer needs to refresh their line-up of games, but there's a good reason why we should stick with established favourites - we know how they work, we know their strengths and weaknesses and we can see how they react when confronted with the latest graphics hardware. New games are great, of course, but often performance is overhauled in the weeks and months following release, whereas older titles tend to sit still with established, predictable frame-rates.

But what it does mean is that we lose out on the latest and greatest new releases and with that, the chance to test GPUs with the latest game engines. With that in mind, we've added a further three titles to our line-up of titles. Strange Brigade from Rebellion seems to be a particular favourite of AMD for benchmarking, and it's an engine that supports toggleable async compute as well as DX12 and Vulkan support (we opted for DX12, which seems slightly more performant). Yes, it's AMD-friendly, but Nvidia's Super driver aims to boost performance on their kit as much as possible.

Battlefield 5 stood out as a game which may present improvements over its predecessor and we're testing it anyway for our ray tracing section, so it gets added to the line-up and also allows us to see how performance deltas may have shifted in the latest update to the Frostbite engine. Finally, we had to give a slot to 4A Games' Metro Exodus. The official benchmark continues to deliver a black screen whenever we boot it, but the initial cutscene on entering the Volga chapter is challenging for both CPU and GPU, so we added it to our line-up. This game is a PC landmark and deserves attention.

We've also tested these titles with an overclock in place on the RTX 2080 Super at 1440p and 4K resolutions. A mere 100MHz could be added to the core - anything more could produce random freezing - while a stunning +1250MHz offset was added to the 15.5Gbps GDDR6 memory. That's a remarkable 18Gbps of throughput and on our sample card at least, it's actually possible to run some applications with a +1500MHz boost. We opted for stability and you can see the results here. Similar to our ray tracing OC tests on page 2, overclocking allows the RTX 2080 Super to sit at a kind of mid-point between 2080S and 2080 Ti performance. And remember once again that the Ti will be running with a first-gen Founders' edition factory overclock.

Strange Brigade

Between its impressive DX12 implementation and its relatively low CPU utilisation, Strange Brigade delivers one of the best examples of stable, consistent performance in our entire line-up - emphasised by the consistent placing of the lowest one per cent scores across all three resolutions tested. At both 1440p and 4K, overclocking cuts the 2080 Ti FE's lead over the 2080 Super in half.

Strange Brigade: Ultra, DX12

Metro Exodus

Nothing to write home about in terms of 2080 vs 2080 Super comparisons - we're a touch CPU-bound at 1080p, resulting in a smaller than expected uplift, but we're back in familiar five to six per cent territory once we move up to the higher resolutions. Interestingly, this is one title where the RTX 2080 Ti can still retain a very commanding lead, even in the face of an aggressively overclocked RTX 2080 Super...

Metro Exodus, Ultra, DX12

Battlefield 5

The AMD Navi scores on this one are fascinating - the 5700 XT is designed to take on the RTX 2070 Super, but here it's putting up a good fight against the RTX 2080 and 2080S. Overclocking results on the RTX 2080 Super are a touch disappointing here, only really living up to expectations when running at 4K resolution, where presumably the memory bandwidth boost can make a bigger impact.

Battlefield 5, Ultra, DX12

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Analysis