AVOID This One? RTX 2080 Super Review & Gaming Benchmarks

So the newest NVIDIA GeForce RTX Super graphics cards is here, but it’s a bit of an odd one. Actually, let’s set the stage first because there’d been some pretty big changes in the last month. Basically, NVIDIA knew AMD was releasing their Navi cards and they dropped the RTX 2070 Super any RTX 2060 Super right before launch. It didn’t help them all that much because Team Red ended up with some sweet GPUs at amazing prices. You can check out our review of those GPUs is right over here. And so that brings us to this, the RTX 2080 Super. Remember the RTX 2070 Super ended up almost matching the older and more expensive RTX 2080, and well NVIDIA really needed something for folks who wanted to pay more for better performance, and so that’s why we have this new Super card.

New, but Not Super New

But you know what, I don’t think NVIDIA did enough to set this card apart from their own lineup or what AMD is currently offering. To explain my thought process, let’s quickly recap what the RTX 2080 Super is all about before heading right into overall performance. Well, it’s basically an RTX 2080 replacement with more cores, faster base and boost clocks and faster GDDR6 memory. However, if you look closely, the specs aren’t all that much different. It will start at $700 for the Founders Edition of course, and go upwards from there. Power consumption is quite a bit more too. And just remember the FE card isn’t pre-overclocked this time, so NVIDIA will be counting on their board partners for that.

The Whole Lineup

So this is what NVIDIA’s RTX lineup looks like right now with the RTX 2080 Ti still sitting at $1000, and below that the RTX 2080 Super for $300 less, then that’s followed by the RTX 2070 Super, and finally the RTX 2060 series. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. Now as for the design, it basically looks like any other Founders Edition RTX Super series card. So you get the downdraft cooler just like the RTX 2070 Super, the backplate, the 8 + 6 pin power connector layout, and that’s pretty much it. Now I actually prefer this kind of a design except for the stupid mirror finish. I don’t exactly know what NVIDIA was thinking in the first place, it just ruins the aesthetics of this graphics card since there’s just fingerprints all over the place.

There have been some mixed reactions in terms of what people think about the RX 5700 XT’s reference design, but it will be interesting to see what board partners do with the RX 5700 series. I’m actually really interested to check out the ASRock Radeon RX 5700 XT Challenger since it looks pretty nice if you asked me.

There’s also another issue I want to bring up, because right now it’s affecting how I look at every one of NVIDIA’s new GPUs and it isn’t good. Unless you buy one directly from NVIDIA, the latest GPUs are almost impossible to find and most of them are just ridiculously overpriced. There might be one or two at the normal MSRP, but with the RX 5700 XT and the RX 5700 around there’s just no way I’d even think of paying a premium. So with this in your mind, take NVIDIA’s $700 price for the RTX 2080 Super with a truck load of salt. I mean, sure, board partners are obligated to come up with reference price versions, but that doesn’t mean that the will be regularly available. There’s no business sense introducing a lower price version of a GPU if you can sell the exact same one for more.

Relative Performance & Value

These are the system specs we used, and primary point of focus is that our Core i9-9900X is overclocked far enough to make sure that CPU bottlenecking doesn’t affect our results too much.

Before getting into individual game benchmarks, let’s take a look at the overall performance from all the titles we ended up testing. As you can see in NVIDIA’s changes really didn’t do all that much since on average the RTX 2080 Super only gets around 8% better performance than the standard RTX 2080, and remember this is an average across all games. So some results were higher than 8%, but a lot of them were much less than that too. Furthermore, it’s only about 12% faster than in RTX 2070 Super, and that card costs $200 less.

Overall, this means that the newest Super model is an absolutely terrible value, even falling behind the EVGA RTX 2080 sitting at $630 right now. Not only that, but I’m sure some board partner versions will be going for almost $800. Just think about that for a second, you could buy two RX 5700 cards for that price. I mean, come on. But I also want you to take a look at the RTX 2080 Ti. First of all, it’s almost impossible to find one for $1,000 since most go for $1100 or more. The Gigabyte card we used has an average price of $1150, with some shops selling it for around $1250, so now let’s look at the actual benchmark charts.

Benchmark Results

You see after seeing the performance gains NVIDIA baked into other Super series cards, the RTX 2080 version should have been so much more. So what happened? Well, it’s not about giving you guys more value. I think NVIDIA’s desperately protecting the RTX 2080 Ti’s $1000 price tag. You see when you add too much performance to the RTX 2080 Super the RTX 2080 Ti can’t be sold for one grand anymore. It just feels like they didn’t have enough here to justify the $700 price, and I think we all know board partners will charge even more for pointless pre-overclocked cards as well. I mean sure in some games performance looks pretty decent, but not for this kind of cash. Most of the time the RTX 2080 Super looked like a bad choice, but at other times it’s just a rip-off.

I also want to bring up a good point some of you made in the RX 5700 XT video. Lower priced cards keep getting faster, and that’s bad news for the RTX 2080 Super. For example, the RX 5700 XT is an amazing value, and even though it’s slower than the RTX 2080 Super, but it costs $300 less. That’s a huge amount of money that can be spent on other upgrades, and you won’t be missing all that much in terms of performance. Even the RTX 2070 Super is within just 12%, but you’d save a ton of money by buying this one instead of the RTX 2080 Super. And this is provided you can actually find one for $500. So there you guys have it, and I’m gonna end this video by saying that the RTX 2080 Super is just way too expensive for what it offers. There are plenty of lower priced GPUs that you can buy and they won’t even provide you with much less performance. My best advice is look somewhere else and don’t even bother with the RTX 2080 Super, at least until it’s received a heft price cut.