Introduction

NVIDIA made its third and final entry to the GeForce RTX 20-series Super family of graphics cards with the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. The company debuted the series with the new RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super launched earlier this month to preempt AMD's Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi," which beat the original RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 at their price points. NVIDIA also augmented the series with the GeForce RTX 2080 Super despite no apparent competition from AMD. The Radeon VII is a limited-edition product that's reportedly being retired with the advent of Navi. So why did NVIDIA feel the need to launch the RTX 2080 Super?

The answer to the question lies in the inadvertent mess NVIDIA created in its product stack with the RTX 2070 Super. The company had maxed out the "TU106" to build the original RTX 2070, and had to tap into the larger "TU104" silicon to carve out the RTX 2070 Super by disabling one of its six GPCs (graphics processing clusters) and end up with 2,560 out of 3,072 CUDA cores physically present. Our reviews of the RTX 2070 Super show it to have a lot of performance over the RTX 2070 non-Super, ending up just 6-8 percent behind the original RTX 2080 in performance. This presents a problem for NVIDIA as it can no longer sell the RTX 2080 at $700 when a $500 card is that close and can be overclocked to close the gap. It now had to find a way to continue selling a $700 graphics card without having to tap into the much larger "TU102" silicon. We hence have the RTX 2080 Super, which continues to be based on the "TU104".



NVIDIA created the original RTX 2080 out of the "TU104" by enabling just 2,944 out of 3,072 CUDA cores. The new RTX 2080 Super is configured with all 3,072 CUDA cores and proportionate increases in other components, such as 192 TMUs, 384 Tensor cores, and 48 RT cores. The second enhancement NVIDIA gave the RTX 2080 Super is higher GPU clock speeds. The GPU Boost frequency of the card is set at 1815 MHz, a 6 percent gain from the 1710 MHz of the original RTX 2080. Lastly, NVIDIA made the memory faster by running it at 15.5 Gbps and using 16 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory chips compared to the 14 Gbps memory clock of the original RTX 2080. This yields a memory bandwidth of 496 GB/s, which is roughly 11 percent gained. The card still draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors, although the TDP is increased to 250 W from the 225 W of the original.

With these changes, NVIDIA is looking to increase the performance gap within its product stack, between the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super, back to levels that exist between the original RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, just so there isn't a vast gorge between the $500 RTX 2070 Super and the $1000 RTX 2080 Ti.



In this review, we have with us the GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition, the de facto reference-design card based on this GPU. It features NVIDIA's lavish dual-fan cooling solution with an added chrome embellishment and clock speeds of 1815 MHz GPU Boost with 15.5 Gbps memory. NVIDIA is pricing this card at US$700 and enabled its add-in card partners to price their cards around this mark, too.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation
• DisplayPort to DVI-D Adapter

The Card

The GeForce RTX 20-series Founders Edition cards are the first graphics cards designed by NVIDIA to use a dual-fan axial-blower cooling solution. Lateral-flow coolers probably weren't cutting it, and NVIDIA probably didn't want to take AMD's route with bulky AIO liquid coolers. The RTX 2080 Super matches the RTX 2080 exactly in looks and size with the only exception being the "Super" markings on the backplate and cooler. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


The board uses one 8-pin and one 6-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


With Turing, NVIDIA is using NVLink as a physical layer for its next-generation SLI technology. NVLink provides sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU rendering at 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs, so latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.

Disassembly

An aluminium base-plate touches a vapor-chamber plate, which in turn is soldered to an aluminium fin stack that is ventilated by the pair of fans.


NVIDIA's backplate has a curve near its back, which makes it wrap around the card slightly, giving it a much more solid impression.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt-modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use them in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).