MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio 8 GB Review 18

MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio 8 GB Review

Architecture & Features »

Introduction

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NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 20-series with the introduction of the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. "Turing" is a moniker that caught us by surprise. A year ago, when everyone thought "Volta" was the successor to "Pascal" since the company already put out the TITAN Volta, "Turing" was speculated to be a crypto-currency mining chip. Little did we realize that NVIDIA's tribute to Alan Turing wouldn't be narrowed to his code-breaking skills that potentially won the Allies the war, but for his honor as the Father of Artificial Intelligence and Theoretical Computing.

Turing comes at a time when the silicon fabrication technology isn't advancing at the rate it used to four years ago, wrecking the architecture roadmaps of several semiconductor giants, including Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm; forcing them to design innovative new architectures on existing foundry nodes. Brute transistor-count increases, as would have been the case with "Volta," are no longer a viable option, and NVIDIA needed a killer feature to sell new GPUs. That killer feature is the RTX Technology. This feature is so big for NVIDIA that it has changed the nomenclature of its client-segment graphics cards with the introduction of the GeForce RTX 20-series.

NVIDIA RTX is a near-turnkey real-time ray-tracing model for game developers that lets them fuse real-time ray-traced objects into 3D scenes that have been rasterized. Ray-tracing the whole scene in existence isn't quite possible yet, but the results with using RTX are still better-looking than anything rasterizing can achieve. To even get those few bits of ray tracing done right, an enormous amount of compute power is required. NVIDIA has hence deployed purpose-built hardware components on its GPUs that sit alongside all-purpose CUDA cores, called RT cores.



NVIDIA invested heavily to stay at the bleeding edge of the hardware that drives pioneering AI research, and over the years, has developed Tensor cores, specialized components that are tasked with matrix multiplication, which speed up deep-learning neural-net building and training via Tensor ops. Although it's a client-segment GPU for gaming, NVIDIA feels GPU-accelerated AI could play an increasingly big role in the company's turnkey GameWorks effects, and a new image-quality enhancement called Deep-Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS). The chips are hence endowed with Tensor cores, just like the TITAN Volta. All that it lacks compared to the $3,000 graphics card from last year is FP64 CUDA cores.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards debut at unusually high prices compared to their predecessors, perhaps because NVIDIA doesn't count the GTX 10-series as a predecessor to begin with. These chips pack not just CUDA cores, but also RT cores and Tensor cores, adding to the transistor count; which along with generational increases in performance contributes to scorching 15%-70% increases in launch prices over the GTX 10-series. The GeForce RTX 2080 is the second-fastest graphics card from the series and is priced at $700 for the base model.

In this review, we take a close look at the MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio, the company's premium RTX 2080 offering and a progeny to a long line of commercially successful Gaming X graphics cards from MSI. With this generation, MSI has introduced a beefy triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution dubbed Tri-Frozr VIII, which has plenty of RGB LED embellishments, and a reasonably 9% factory overclock, with the GPU ticking at 1515 MHz and 1860 MHz GPU Boost.

Our exhaustive coverage of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series "Turing" debut also includes the following reviews:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11 GB | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition 8 GB | ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti STRIX OC 11 GB | ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 STRIX OC 8 GB | Palit GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming Pro OC 8 GB | MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio 11 GB | MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Duke 11 GB | NVIDIA RTX and Turing Architecture Deep-dive

GeForce RTX 2080 Market Segment Analysis
 PriceShader
Units
ROPsCore
Clock
Boost
Clock
Memory
Clock
GPUTransistorsMemory
GTX 1070$390 1920641506 MHz1683 MHz2002 MHzGP1047200M8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56$400 3584641156 MHz1471 MHz800 MHzVega 1012500M8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1070 Ti$4002432641607 MHz1683 MHz2000 MHzGP1047200M8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1080$470 2560641607 MHz1733 MHz1251 MHzGP1047200M8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RX Vega 64$570 4096641247 MHz1546 MHz953 MHzVega 1012500M8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti$675 3584881481 MHz1582 MHz1376 MHzGP10212000M11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RTX 2070$4992304641410 MHz1620 MHz1750 MHzTU10610800M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 FE$5992304641410 MHz1710 MHz1750 MHzTU10610800M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080$6992944641515 MHz1710 MHz1750 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 FE$7992944641515 MHz1800 MHz1750 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
MSI RTX 2080
Gaming X Trio
$8292944641515 MHz1860 MHz1750 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti$9994352641350 MHz1545 MHz1750 MHzTU10218600M11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 2080 Ti FE$11994352641350 MHz1635 MHz1750 MHzTU10218600M11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
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Nov 14th, 2024 04:34 EST change timezone

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