NVIDIA this week had PC gamers salivating with the launch of its new GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs. But while much of the presentation was rightly focused on the absurdly gorgeous visuals enabled by the cards' ray tracing tech and Turing architecture, NVIDIA didn't initially offer up much information on how the GPUs would stack up on current titles that may not take advantage of the more eye-catching bells and whistles.
Now, that company has revealed how the standard RTX 2080 stacks up against its predecessor, the GTX 1080, in current games. And the results look pretty darn promising.
According to NVIDIA's numbers, the new Turing-based cards will deliver performance gains of up to 50 percent over the GTX 1080 in games like Final Fantasy XV, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. That's with standard gameplay at 4K resolution without tapping into Turing's new deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) tech, which the company describes thusly:
DLSS takes advantage of our tensor cores' ability to use AI. In this case it's used to develop a neural network that teaches itself how to render a game. It smooths the edges of rendered objects and increases performance.
Once DLSS is enabled, performance far exceeds the games with standard settings, topping double the performance over the 1080 in several games.
All of that raw performance has some serious benefits for games currently on the market. In a separate slide, NVIDIA says that the GeForce RTX series can achieve framerates well above the usual benchmark of 60 FPS in games like Resident Evil 7, Far Cry 5, and Destiny 2. Others stand out even more, with 93 FPS in Call of Duty: WWII and 84 in Battlefield 1. All of these framerates were achieved at 4K resolution with HDR.
All of this is to say that, anyone upgrading from a GTX 1080 will see significant performance gains right away. Where things will get very interesting, however, is when we start seeing titles that take advantage of the gorgeous ray tracing effects enabled by the new cards, which make the lighting in every scene look much more natural.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series is up for preorder now starting at $599 from NVIDIA itself and a range of third-party manufacturers.
