Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: rasterisation analysis

After that brief look at ray tracing, it's time to return to the world of rasterisation as we examine RTX 2080 Super performance in a range of new and old titles. Backing up our 2080 Super is our usual test rig, powered by a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz and cooled by a Corsair H110i all-in-one unit. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of GSkill DDR4 running at 3400MHz and a bevy of solid state storage for Windows 10 and all of our games.

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.

It's a system designed to give you as much in-depth data as you want - or indeed as little, for at-a-glance viewing - all derived from video captures of each respective GPU. No internal frame-rate measurements here, it all comes from the video output of the card itself, the best way to ensure accuracy.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

We begin with Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the 11th main game in the long-running open world series. This game is famously punishing on the CPU side of the equation, so we'd expect there to be only margin-of-error differences between the 2080 and 2080 Super at the lower resolutions. Unsurprisingly, armed with more memory bandwidth and less reliance on CPU, the 2080 Super delivers around five per cent of extra performance at 1440p and 4K. In its notes to journalists, Nvidia told us to expect a 10 per cent boost over reference RTX 2080s, and a five point increase over the old Founders Edition - so we are essentially on track here. There's a boost, but it's not exactly a spectacular one.

Assassin's Creed Unity

One of our favourite legacy games, Assassin's Creed Unity was a game designed for a level of console power that neither Microsoft nor Sony could deliver, and PC is far and away the best way to play this still-beautiful title. The RTX 2080 Super leads its predecessor by six percentage points at 1440p and nine at 4K. If we compare the 2080 Super and Radeon 7, there's an even bigger gap: the Super card has around a 25 per cent lead at both 1440p and 4K, a lot of it down to a depth of field effect that cripples older AMD hardware. It's impressive stuff, but the 2080 Super doesn't really come close to challenging the 60fps 4K average achieved by the RTX 2080 Ti, 22 per cent to the better.

Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1 running under DirectX 12 is one of the kindest tests of AMD hardware and that fact allows the Radeon 7 to outperform the RTX 2080 at higher resolutions. With the Super card, Nvidia beats Radeon 7 at all resolutions, and it seems to be a title that enjoys the luxury offered by the Super's extra compute and bandwidth - a 10 to 11 per cent performance lead over the 2080 FE is double the expected boost, based on Nvidia's projections.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• RTX vs RTX Super: Ray Tracing Performance Analysis - Stock + Overclocked
• Assassin's Creed Odyssey/Unity, Battlefield 1 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 1 [This Page]
• Crysis 3, Far Cry 5, Ghost Recon Wildlands - Rasterisation Analysis Part 2
• Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 3
• Strange Brigade, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 + Overclocking - Rasterisation Analysis Part 4
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super - The Digital Foundry Verdict