by Rob Williams on July 31, 2019 in Graphics & Displays
The third card in NVIDIA’s new SUPER lineup has landed, becoming the new top-end offering of the bunch (but still sitting far enough behind the 2080 Ti). We’re taking a look at NVIDIA’s newest $699 graphics card offering across a range of games at three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, and ultrawide.
Battlefield V
In truth, the RTX 2080 SUPER is a powerful enough card to be considered a true 4K option, but because we hadn’t tested 4K resolution on any of the previous cards, we’ve skipped over that resolution for now. With the resolutions we did test, we’re not seeing significant gains from the SUPER, but again, the SRP remains the same, so whatever boost comes included is technically delivered for free.
For offline play, the 2080 SUPER has no problem handling BFV, giving us 90 FPS at the ultrawide resolution, which is quite attractive given we’re using maxed-out detail levels. That of course doesn’t include RTX, which will force the game to run at a lower resolution to attain playable frame rates. We’re planning to dive more into RTX performance at a later date.
F1 2019
At 1080p, the 2080 SUPER has enough power to deliver 144Hz gameplay. Bumping the resolution to 1440p doesn’t change a whole lot, with the card now peaking at 123 FPS. Clearly, the performance with F1 is so good, you’d owe it to yourself to get a high-refresh rate monitor if it’s one of your primary games, since it will look truly buttery smooth. Even at the ultrawide resolution, there’s enough performance to hit 100Hz.
Far Cry 5
For the most part, we’re seeing the 2080 SUPER deliver a similar gap over the original 2080 Founders Edition as that card leads over the 2070 SUPER. We’re not exactly being “wowed” so far with 2~4% performance increases, but again, it’s a little hard to complain when the new SUPER costs as much as the non-SUPER.
Either way, Far Cry 5 isn’t the most graphically intensive game going, despite the fact that it looks really good. Even at the ultrawide resolution of 3440×1440, the 2080 SUPER manages to deliver over 90 FPS. More than ever, it feels like if you have a high-end GPU, you should really be thinking about greater than 60Hz monitors.
Metro Exodus
The Metro series is one of the most grueling on PC hardware. We saw it with Metro 2033, again with Last Light, and now with Exodus. Even at 1080p, if you want to use high detail settings, you will need a powerful GPU. The 2080 SUPER gains 4 FPS over the original 2080 FE, hitting 82 FPS at 1080p. Even the ultrawide resolution delivers 54 FPS with this GPU.
We’re using the built-in benchmark for testing with this game, though we may slip into manual testing in the future, once we find an appropriate level, since the minimums here don’t look so hot. That’s especially true at the ultrawide res, with drops hitting around 30 FPS.
With as hard as this game is on GPUs, Exodus could very well act as a benchmark for years.