Why it matters: The GPU scene has seen no shortage of action and beautiful, glorious competition lately at every price point but one: the $700+ mark. Finally, it appears the venerable GTX 1080 Ti will be replaced by a worthy competitor, the RTX 2080 Super. Tipped to release on July 23 for $700 and bringing around a 10% performance boost with all the extra RTX goodness, it'll be a fan favorite for sure.
As seemingly happens before every GPU release, the RTX 2080 Super has appeared in the Final Fantasy XV public benchmark database with a score of 8663, roughly the same as the Titan V. It's also 7.4% better than the regular RTX 2080, and 10.6% better than a GTX 1080 Ti (two cards which fight tooth and nail for superiority in every title).
Nvidia has already announced the card's specs (below) and it edges out the 2080 in most predictable ways: ~7% increases to base and boost speeds, a 10.7% boost to memory bandwidth, and 4.3% more cores. The TDP increases predictably, but the Founder's Edition (pictured) keeps the same cooler. While the specs are impressive, it still falls a long way behind the 2080 Ti, which outperforms it by 15% in FFXV.
| RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 2080 Super | RTX 2080 | RTX 2070 Super | |
| Price (MSRP) | $1000 | $700 (?) | $700 | $500 |
| Graphics Core | 4352 CUDA | 3072 CUDA | 2944 CUDA | 2560 CUDA |
| Base Clock | 1350 MHz | 1650 MHz | 1515 MHz | 1605 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1545 MHz | 1815 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1770 MHz |
| Memory | 11 GB | 8 GB | 8 GB | 8 GB |
| Memory Bandwidth | 616 GB/s | 496 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 448 GB/s |
| TDP | 250 W | 250 W | 215 W | 215 W |
| FFXV Performance | 115% | 100% | 93% | 88% |
Nvidia's website claims the 2080 Super outperforms the GTX 1080 Ti by ~35%, but they have cherry picked games and included two which use ray tracing, which the GTX series is not optimized for. Nvidia has a bad track record with 'official' benchmarks, so it's best to wait for independent third-party reviews, like TechSpot's.
VideoCardz leaked the prices and release dates of the whole Nvidia Super series a while back, and they were right with the 2060 Super and 2070 Super. For the 2080 Super, they say it will release on the 23rd for $699, so we can look forward to its imminent appearance. And, of course, Nvidia is expected to bundle Wolfenstein: Young Blood and Control with purchases until August 18.