The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti & RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Foundations For A Ray Traced Future
by Nate Oh on September 19, 2018 5:15 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Raytrace
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- DirectX Raytracing
- Turing
- GeForce RTX
Total War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
| Total War Warhammer II |
1920x1080 | 2560x1440 | 3840x2160 |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
At 1080p, the cards quickly run into the CPU bottleneck, which is to be expected with top-tier video cards and the CPU intensive nature of RTS'es. The Founders Edition power and clock tweaks prove less useful here at 4K, but the models are otherwise in keeping with the expected 1-2-3 linup of 2080 Ti, 2080, and 1080 Ti, with the latter two roughly on par and the 2080 Ti pushing further.
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ESR323 - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
I agree with the conclusion that these cards aren't a good buy for 1080ti owners. My 1080ti overclocks very nicely and I'll be happy to stick with it until the next generation in 7 nm. By then we might have a decent selection of games that make use of ray tracing and the performance increase will be more appealing.imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
Yah i agree, especially its only a 20-25fps increase on average. While many might thing thats great, considering the price increase over 1080TI and the fact many 1080TI can overclock to close that gap even more. The features don't justify the cost.However, it could be lots of performance could be unlocked via driver updates..we really don't know how tensor cores could increase performance till the games get updated to use it. Also, while super expensive option...how does the new SLI performance increase performance? Lets see a compare from 1080TI sli to newer sli 2080TI..maybe its easier to put into games? So many what-ifs with this product.
I feel this product should of been delayed till more games/software already had feature sets available to see.
Aybi - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
There wont be driver&optimization support for 1000 series. They will focus on 2000 series and with that the gap going to increase a lot.If you remember 980ti and 1080ti it was the same case when 1080ti announced and then you know what happened.
Vayra - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link
Actually I don't and there is also no data to back up what you're saying. The 980ti still competes with the 1070 as it did at Pascal launch.Don't spread BS
Matthmaroo - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Dude that’s not true at allNvidia will fully support the 10 series for the next 5 -10 years
They all use the same CUDA cores
Don’t just make crap up to justify your purchase
SanX - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
What the useless job the reviewer is doing comparing only to latest generstion cards? Add at least 980Ti and 780TiMrSpadge - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
Ever heard of their benchmark database?Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link
You'll be glad to hear then that we'll be backfilling cards.There was a very limited amount of time ahead of this review, and we thought it to be more important to focus on things like clocking the cards at their actual reference clocks (rather than NVIDIA's factory overclocks).
dad_at - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Many thanks for that, I think it is useful job, people are still using maxwell(or even older) generation GPU in 2018. And when we could expect maxwell (980/980ti) results to appear in GPU 2018 bench? Could you also please add Geforce GTX Titan X (maxwell) to GPU 2018?StevoLincolnite - Sunday, September 23, 2018 - link
Hopefully you back-fill a substantial amount, the GPU bench this year has been a bit lacking... Especially in regards to mid-range and older parts.Whole point of it is so that you can see how the latest and greatest compare it to your old and crusty.