Today, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 Super is available in both the Founders Edition and custom-design variants. While it seems surprising at first that NVIDIA is releasing a new model in a market segment with zero competition, it makes sense if you take a closer look at their product stack. In order to counter AMD's Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 Series, NVIDIA released the "Super" refresh of Turing, which offers faster variants of the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070. Unlike the original RTX 2070, the RTX 2070 Super is based on the TU104 graphics processor, which is the same chip that powers the RTX 2080 lineup. This jump in performance shrunk the gap between the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, which makes the original RTX 2080 less attractive to potential buyers, especially at its current price point. That's why NVIDIA is giving the RTX 2080 the +1 treatment, too. The RTX 2080 Super is based on the same TU104 GPU that powers the RTX 2080, but uses all shaders available in the silicon. NVIDIA is also bumping their memory clocks up to 15.5 Gbps, which helps with performance, too.

Overall, when averaged over our benchmarks at 4K resolution, the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition is 8% faster than the original RTX 2080, which widens the gap to the RTX 2070 Super to 16%, restoring the balance in this market segment. NVIDIA's flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, is 18% faster than the RTX 2080 Super. AMD's fastest, the now end-of-life Radeon VII, is 15% behind, and the new Navi-based RX 5700 XT is 25% slower—not even close. Performance numbers of the RTX 2080 Super are good, the higher FPS rates definitely help improve the gaming experience at 4K. While not a 4K60 max details card, it is good enough for solid 4K gaming with decent frame rates if you are willing to sacrifice some details settings (depending on the game). Its high performance will also help gamers looking to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor beyond 60 Hz on 1440p at the highest details.

NVIDIA is reusing the PCB and cooler design of their RTX 2080, which is a perfectly fine choice. Like all other Founders Editions, the card impresses with its gorgeous looks, but does fall behind a bit in thermal performance when compared against custom designs. Gaming temperatures and noise levels are "fine" with 78°C and 36 dBA, but neither can really impress. NVIDIA optimized the fan settings well given the capabilities of the dual-slot cooler. What I do miss is the idle-fan-stop feature, which shuts off the card's fans completely in idle, productivity, and light gaming—all RTX 2080 Super custom designs we reviewed so far include this capability though. Idle noise levels are "quiet", but could be even a little bit lower, like on the RTX 2060 Super. Gaming noise is slightly increased over the RTX 2080 Founders Edition, which is as expected given the higher performance and identical thermal solution. While you'll be able to notice the card's fans during gaming, they are not terribly noisy and well within acceptable levels.

Just like on all other Turing cards, power efficiency of the RTX 2080 Super is excellent. With 260-280 W, power requirements are a good deal higher than the original RTX 2080 and similar to the RTX 2080 Ti, but any half-decent PSU should be able to power it with ease. NVIDIA did increase their card's power limit with the Super variant, but the limit is still too low for the card to run uncapped. While this approach helps with power efficiency, it complicates overclocking a bit because you can no longer dial in the exact clocks you want to overclock to. Still, our manual overclocking tests show good results, leading to a 8.3% real-life performance improvement—more than expected. Especially the Samsung 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips overclock extremely well, reaching 2300 MHz in frequency (18.4 Gbps). Wondering why NVIDIA chose to clock their card at 15.5 Gbps even though the memory chips themselves are guaranteed to run at 16 Gbps, I reached out to them and got the response that "this is related to the PCB design of the original 2080 board. On the 2080 Super we reach max stability at 15.5, while leaving some OC headroom".

Like all other NVIDIA RTX cards, the RTX 2080 Super includes support for raytracing hardware acceleration. With only a few titles so far, I'm not sure if it's the most important technology to have today, but I am convinced that NVIDIA with their close ties to developers will do everything they can to push this technology forward, which ultimately will result in an improvement in fidelity in games. Console makers Sony and Microsoft are also working on raytracing for their next-gen hardware, which will definitely help adoption rates, too. The RTX 2080 Super has additional RT cores and higher performance overall, which will help cushion the performance hit from raytracing.

Priced at $699, the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition actually launches at a lower price than the RTX 2080, which launched "starting at $699" with no cards in sight, and even the Founders Edition ended up being priced at $799. Combined with the RTX 2080 Super's performance, I think this (small) change in NVIDIA's pricing strategy definitely helps make the RTX 2080 Super more attractive against the in-house competition from both sides of the spectrum. The RTX 2070 Super can be had for $500—around 20% better price/performance, but simply not enough horsepower for 4K gaming. If you have the money, the RTX 2080 Ti at $1100 will get you the 4K60 performance, but at a hefty price premium.

Let's not kid ourselves, $700 is a lot of money, but options are limited: the Radeon VII is end-of-life, the RTX 2070 Super is too slow for 4K, the original RTX 2080 only has marginally better price/performance and lacks the memory OC headroom of the RTX 2080 Super, and the RTX 2080 Ti is probably too expensive for people with just $600-$800 to spend. In order to offset the cost a little bit and show off the benefits of their RTX technology, NVIDIA includes a two-game bundle with all RTX Super cards consisting of Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Control, which both support raytracing.