Nvidia's next generation of graphics cards have arrived, promising to be significanltly more powerful than the GeForce GTX 1080, as they are designed to deliver true of 4K gaming at 60 fps. We have in ours hand for some becnhmarks the new RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 2080 Ti is the "Founders Edition" card, which have a 3-year warranty and are overclocked by default.

The new RTX series includes the RTX 2070 (starting at $499), RTX 2080 (starting at $699), and RTX 2080 Ti (starting at $999). The Founders Edition pushes the RTX 2080 Ti up to an eye-watering $1,199.

Some days ago we went into some details about the new Turiq architecture of the RTX series. In short, we are talking about support for both real-time ray tracing and AI-powered anti-aliasing. Ray tracing is used to generate real-time light reflections and cinematic effects in games. But before you even get a game installed on your PC, Nvidia's Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) leverages the company's supercomputers to scan games before they are released and work out the most efficient way to render graphics.

We cannot test ray tracing or DLSS with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti units yet, until Microsoft delivers its Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

Nvidia claims that more than 25 games will support DLSS, and at least 11 will have ray tracing in the coming months.

So today we treat these new cards as we typically do in our GPU reviews, mainly by measuring their horsepower during gaming. But this time Nvidia has raised the bar, so testing will be mainly done under demanding 2K and 4K resolutions.

In terms of hardware, Nvidia has has ditched the metal shield and blower combination that has served it well in the past in favor of a new dual-fan setup for its Founders Edition cards. There's also now a full-length vapor chamber that helps make the cards run quieter and cooler.

GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition

GeForce RTX 2080Ti Founders Edition

All the RTX series use GPU cores produced by TSMC and its 12nm FinFET NVIDIA (12nm FFN) process. The cards also use GDDR6 memory (14Gbps) and thus, their memory bandwidth has reached to 448GBps for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and at 616GBps for the GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2070. Take a look at the main spaeicications of teh new cards below:

Have in mind that Nvidia is recommending that your system has at least a 650W power supply if you want to run either the RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti properly. If you're purchasing the Founders Edition cards, they'll draw up to 225 watts and 260 watts, respectively. That's a significant step up from the recommended 500W power supply (and 180W draw) of the GTX 1080, and it means you'll need a 6-pin and 8-pin connector for the RTX 2080 or two 8-pins for the RTX 2080 Ti. During testing, we saw the RTX 2080 Ti drawing 45 watts of power when idle (!), but Nvidia says that a driver update will address this issue shortly and bring idle consumption down to between 10 watts and 15 watts.

The new NVLink connector replaced the traditional SLI connector

Nvidia has also included three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs that can handle up to 8K resolution on a single cable with DSC 1.2. There's also an HDMI 2.0b connector and a VirtualLink USB-C connector for the next generation of VR headsets.

Test setup

• GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB)
• GeForce RTX 2080 (8GB)
• GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
• GeForce GTX 1080
• AMD Radeon RX Vega 64

Intel Core i7-8700K
ASUS PRIME Z370-A (UEFI: 1002)
DDR4-2666 8GB × 2 (2ch, 19-19-19-43,1.2V)
Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2-PCIe 3.0 x4
GeForce Game Ready Driver 411.51, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.9.1 Windows 10 Pro 64bit (Ver 1803 / build 17134.285) - High performance