NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER At 1080p, 1440p & Ultrawide

With the third SUPER card benchmarked and its results tabulated, where does that leave us? Honestly, of all the SUPER cards, this one has the least reason to exist, as the performance gains over the Founders Edition are modest at best. The level of gain we did see is the kind of enhancement we’d expect to get from overclocking.

That said, NVIDIA wisely kept the 2080 SUPER’s pricing identical to the original, so there’s no room for complaining about minimal gains. Those who were planning to get a 2080 anyway will now get one that’s just a bit faster. And, if it’s important to you, the new mirror finish on the FE-style cooler is a cool aesthetic feature.

With its $699 price tag, the RTX 2080 SUPER is as high-end as you can go without breaking into the 2080 Ti territory. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to get the Radeon VII tested for this article, but based on current supply, it does seem like AMD has EOL’d the card. Its own website currently lists prices upwards of $1,000 from third-party sellers, and no longer has the card in stock itself. That’s a bit unfortunate, but not a surprise, given how minor the margins would have been on a card with 16GB of expensive HBM2 memory.

The RTX 2080 SUPER, like the original, is perfectly suitable for resolutions up to 4K, with the ultrawide 3440×1440 proving to be a great sweet spot. 1080p is a joke for a card like the 2080S, but 1440p is no problem, either. The card hit over 80 FPS at max detail in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at that resolution, and just over 100 FPS in Monster Hunter World at high detail and with the high-res texture pack.

We’d love to say something like, “It’d be nice if the card had more than 8GB of memory”, since 8GB is obviously a “sweet spot” now. Even the RTX 2060 SUPER has 8GB, so it would have been nice to see a bump with a card that costs 75% more. But that said, we can’t exactly call 8GB “weak”, and if you end up hitting a roadblock because of it, we’d love to hear about it.

With all three of its SUPERs, NVIDIA is taking care of the $400, $500, and now $700 price points, and all things considered, each one of these cards are priced according to what we’d expect, but the 2080S definitely carries a bit more of a premium over the others. The delta between the $999 2080 Ti and $699 2080 SUPER is much greater than the one between the $699 2080 SUPER and $499 2070 SUPER. However, we expect there to be some bitterness from early adopters that bought the non-Super cards, which is unfortunately a common occurrence in the tech sector.

Whatever your price point, NVIDIA has an answer, even if it’s the lower-tier non-RTX 1600 series GPUs. From AMD, the most modern competition comes from the RX 5700 XT series, which has no 2080S competitors, with the XT trailing the 2070 SUPER most often. More on offer from AMD would be great, but these are the choices we are currently given, and while it sucks to see only one company dominating the high-end, could you imagine how dull things would be if we didn’t even have that much?