Review: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition

Conclusion

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card is the final piece of the premium 2019 summer refresh. On paper, there is enough to like, including the full use of the TU104 die, faster GDDR6 memory, marginally higher core frequency, and a $100 snip compared to the RTX 2080 FE from September last year. And the rumoured death-knell delivered to rival AMD Radeon VII puts Nvidia into an even stronger position in the premium segment of the graphics card market.

Yet, arguably, RTX 2080 Super is the least impressive of the newly-released trio. Benchmark performance is, mostly, five per cent better than the original RTX 2080 FE, so about the same speed as a partner-overclocked card, and there's certainly not the keen uplift observed when moving from the RTX 2070 to RTX 2070 Super.

Using the full force of the TU104 die, rather than cutting down the impressive TU102 that powers RTX 2080 Ti, means this Super struggles to establish itself from a glut of RTX 2080s that have come before. In effect, this performs like one of those RTX 2080 OCs... married to a keener price.

Such a move makes the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition worth a look if you can afford the £669 asking fee, because there is no real competition, but it does put partners into a really awkward spot; their 'new' cards won't offer much more performance but are likely to cost well north of £700. If it was our money, we'd go for an RTX 2070 Super, for around £500, and put the change elsewhere in the system.

Bottom line: GeForce RTX 2080 Super offers an incremental upgrade over last year's RTX 2080. The least impressive of the new Super models when compared to predecessors from an absolute performance uplift point of view, it still naturally remains the best-performing GPU card this side of silly money.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition

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TBC.

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