PC HARDWARE | Palit Super JetStream RTX 2080: First impressions of the GeForce RTX cards

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Nvidia has recently launched their new RTX cards and we had the opportunity to check out of the new card: the RTX 2080. Palit graciously sent their Super JetStream RTX 2080, the fastest 2080 card in their arsenal right now for us to try out.

GeForce RTX

Generally, the GeForce RTX series is Nvidia’s gamble to introduce real-time ray-tracing tech to push game developers with the all new “Turing” GPU architecture. This has been made possible by with their purpose-built  hardware that sits in their GPUs in addition to the CUDA cores, called RT cores.

The RT cores are specialized components that compute the mathematical representation of rays in a rendered 3D scene and will transverse the scene to calculate the point of of any intersection with any triangle in the scene in real-time, which in turn creating improved realism in 3D models. It is a compute-heavy task that would otherwise bog down the CUDA cores.

We are not going to deep dive about RTX tech itself but there are a lot of dive articles regarding the features that lies underneath the RTX tech that you can look up but these features include Mesh Shading, Variable Rate Shading, Content-Adaptive Shading, Motion-Adaptive Shading, Texture-Space Shading, Foveated Rendering, and even Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing.

At the time of this writing, RTX enabled games are not yet available but the demos look amazing. This is something that game developers will have to work on in the future and what we can actually show right now is the raw gaming performance of this RTX 2080 graphics card.

Palit Super JetStream 2080 specifications
GPU Clock 1515MHz
Boost Clock 1860MHz
Memory Clock 14GGbps
RTX-OPS 62T
Cuda Cores 2944
Memory Bandwith (GB/sec) 448
Board Size 292 x 130 x 59.6 mm
Height 2.7 slot
Max Resolution 7680 x 4320@60hz
Recommended System Power 650 W
Power connectors 8-pin X2

 

Aesthetics

Being a 2.7 slot graphics card, the Palit SuperJetstream RTX 2080 is a beefy card and stays faithful to the aesthetics of previous generations of the Palit SuperJetStream. It has a nice looking backplate, RGB lighting, Turbo Fanblade 2.0.

The RGB LED can actually be used to indicate GPU temperature but it can also be configured to any of the 16.8 million colors available which can be control by the ThunderMaster Utility.

The card also features a dual-BIOS which is a good protection measure in case of BIOS failures of the GPU. It also has A 10+2 DrMOS PWM power phase for a stable voltage level and overall efficiency.

Aside from the usual DisplayPorts, the RTX 2080 also has USB Type C connectivity that serves as a VirtualLink connector for VR device or another display with a DP/USB-C port.

 

Gaming Performance

For now, we don’t have any data on what RTX-enabled games may bring in terms of gaming performance with the RTX 2080 but what we can give right now is the card’s relative  performance in gaming up against previous generation of Nvidia graphics cards. The games are all tested in 4K resolution with the Ultra preset without anti-aliasing.

 

Testing rig:

CPU – Ryzen 7 2700x (stock clocks)

Memory – 2x8GB G.Skill Sniper X 3400MHz DDR4 memory

Motherboard – MSI X470 Gaming Plus

Graphics cards:

Palit Super JetStream GeForce RTX2080

Asus Strix GeForce RTX  2070 Gaming

Asus Poseidon GeForce GTX 1080Ti

Galax GeForce GTX 1080 EXOC White

Here are the relative gaming performance charts in different sets of games that we tested.

Ashes of the Singularity
Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Monster Hunter: World
Rainbow Six: Siege
Sniper Elite 4
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
3DMark Time Spy Extreme

In summary, the RTX 2080 isn’t that much of a generational upgrade from the GTX 1080 Ti that we were expecting in terms of raw performance. As you can see in the performance charts in several games that we tested, the Asus ROG Poseidon GTX 1080 Ti performs really close to the Palit Super JetStream RTX 2080 in 4k gaming.

We were able to achieve above 60 frames per second and above on most of the games we tested in 4K resolution without anti-aliasing and this has been satisfactory compared to the results given by the Galax GTX 1080 EXOC White that we used. In these results, we see around an estimated average of 67.5% performance gap between the GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 in the games we tested.

Looking at the synthetic benchmark results in both 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy Extreme, we can see that the gap between the GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 is really close with the RTX graphics card.

As for the Palit Super JetStream’s GPU temperature, the card was able to maintain a pretty cool temperature, which never went above 70-72°C under load thanks to its beefy heat sink and Turbo Fanblades.

Conclusion

In closing, we think that the Palit Super JetStream GeForce RTX 2080 is a decent card on it’s own in terms of aesthetics and cooling performance. As of the moment, we see RTX as a gamble for Nvidia until we start seeing RTX-enabled games. On a raw performance standpoint, the generational gap between the GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 is very impressive but putting it up against the GTX 1080 Ti still makes upgrading to the RTX somewhat a less value if you are just after gaming performance.

We still have yet to see how RTX will be implemented in the future as Nvidia promised RTX enabled games to start coming up in the beginning of next year. Should user take the gamble and upgrade to the RTX 2080? If you are currently a GTX 1080 Ti user, maybe not just yet.

Ira James is an enthusiast who has his roots on PC hardware and gaming. His career as a tech journalist began after working in the PR industry for two years. He started GGWPTech to write PC hardware reviews, gaming, cyber security, and enterprise tech news. His works are also syndicated by other media publishers: Tech Sabado, and the Sunday and Business I.T. section of Manila Times.

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