Nvidia gathered all the assembled journalists at Gamescom today to share more details about its RTX series GPUs, including performance numbers in a handful of top titles, including 4k performance numbers. Since I wasn't allowed to do any of my own benchmarking all I have to share is Nvidia's slides, so take them with a grain of salt since these are essentially marketing materials. We'll be doing our own independent benchmarking as soon as we get the GPU series in-hand. First up are some 4k benchmarks for current games, meaning there is no RTX fanciness impacting these numbers, which provides a sense of how the GPU runs games that are out right now and compare to 2017's GPUs.
These numbers are interesting for several reasons. First of all, the big claim here is that with the RTX 2080 you can run games at 4K with HDR at 60fps. It's right there in black and white, so if you were hoping that these new GPUs would be able to run one of them fancy new monitors at 4K 144Hz with HDR, it doesn't look like that'll be the case. Then again, this is the RTX 2080, not the 2080 Ti, which is more powerful. I asked Nvidia why they provided these numbers instead of the 2080, and they simply told me that's what review are for.
These numbers are still impressive, but not the 100fps or higher than we had hoped for. And we remind you again that we'll be doing our own independent testing as soon as possible. We'll have to see how these numbers compare to the GTX 1080 Ti, of course, but it's a safe bet the RTX is indeed faster simply because it's a bigger die with better efficiency, but it's hard to quantify how much faster exactly right now.
4K Performance with RTX Titles
Next up is a slide showing RTX-enabled games compared to a GTX 1080 at 4K. Keep in mind that RTX can mean either ray tracing, Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), or both. For this chart it's just DLSS, so we'll have to wait and see how ray tracing affects 4k gaming.
For comparison Nvidia is showing RTX 2080 numbers with-and-without DLSS enabled. This is a new form of anti-aliasing the company claims improves performance in certain titles, essentially giving you smooth edges and a performance boost, which sounds like magic but again, this is Nvidia's data. With that said, here are the numbers they provided:
Overall, Nvidia is claiming the RTX 2080 is about 1.5x faster than the 1080 at 4K resolution, which is a decent amount of "uplift" as they say in marketing slides. If you have DLSS enabled, the delta can be as high as 2X, which is certainly surprising.
Though we'll have to wait until we can benchmark the GPUs ourselves, these 4K numbers do look promising. As we noted in our gameplay clip of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, all of the demo stations Nvidia set up at the launch event were running at 1080p and 60Hz with RTX 2080 Ti FE cards, which seemed like an odd pairing for a $1,200 GPU.
It struck us as curious they wouldn't be showcasing their new GPU at 4K, since one would assume that is what it was designed to do. However, since the Tomb Raider demo had ray tracing enabled, we assumed perhaps the performance hit was such that you simply can't run the game at 4K with ray tracing. I asked Nvidia about this and they said it can, and Tomb Raider ran sub-60fps simply because it's pre-alpha with beta drivers. When I asked why there were no 4K demo stations setup they just said they wanted to focus on ray tracing this time around, not 4k gaming. I'm not sure why they couldn't do both. One Nvidia rep assured me, of course, that 4K gamers would have no complaints with an RTX GPU. We'll be running those tests soon to confirm.
So there you have it – 4K numbers for both RTX and non-RTX titles. Though it's not the 4K 144Hz demon most of us hoped for, it seems like the Turing GPUs will provide a decent boost over Pascal, with the added bonus of ray tracing and DLSS on select titles, with more coming out in the future. As always we can't wait to test a Turing GPU ourselves so we can get some "real" numbers, and hopefully we'll be doing just that in the very near future.
