Nvidia Releases The Beast – Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Review

Final Thoughts

When SUPER first launched, I admittedly thought it was a reactionary move to AMD’s NAVI based 5700 series of GPUs. And, to be fair, it very well may have been. But with that aside the SUPER cards are shaping up to be one hell of a performer while also helping to bring down the cost of the new RTX cards in a step by step fashion.

While this is it for the SUPER series as far as we have seen thus far, seeing the performance jump and the prices drop are always welcome to me as it’s great for us consumers. I do still believe that Nvidia initially held back the 2080 SUPER to ensure they had an ace in the hole if AMD had another more powerful GPU waiting on the sidelines. I feel like the performance level delivered and the constant driver development I have seen, such as the recent improvements to Shadows of the Tomb Raider, tells a big part of the story. You are not simply buying a graphics card when you buy Nvidia, you are investing in an ecosystem of support and updates to ensure you have drivers that will increase your performance in games even on day one.

What you just read above may have seemed like high praise for Nvidia and well, it is. Nvidia has made some amazing cards in the RTX lineup with not only amazing performance but truly next-gen feature sets. Not everything is rosy though, prices are still high, but the SUPER series has been a first step toward remedying that concern.

Heres the score breakdown

Value – 90 The RTX SUPER series cards bring some much-needed price reductions to the RTX series, especially since Nvidia has been lambasted for the prices since the initial introduction. In essence, the cards all leveled up a bit to a state of almost replacing the next card up the tier, and at a lower cost of entry.

Performance – 95 Performance specifically for the RTX 2080 SUPER is not just good, but TITAN Xp and even TITAN V level good in some scenarios.

Innovation – 90 Innovation, I am looking at the RTX 2080 SUPER, and while the card simply has more SM’s and higher clock speed, Nvidia also did add the fastest GDDR6 in existence or at least of any consumer card at the time of writing, I think that deserves a bump in the score compared to the initial SUPER series review.

Quality – 95 Quality is something I am also very critical about. And while some may call quality the materials, fit and finish, etc. I look at all aspects of quality including support, software, and experience by end-users as that will really define the quality of a product. The RTX SUPER cards much like the RTX cards from before it are all very good quality both on the PCB level along with component choices. also, having game ready drivers at the day of launch for critical titles is a great thing and shows Nvidia’s dedication to the gamers even if some of the bigger HPC and data center clients may pay their bills far more than gaming ever could.

Now we must wait to see what RTG has up their sleeve along with Intel’s highly anticipated discreet offerings which will be releasing in about half a year. We may see a slight slow down on GPUs until then, but if this recent release schedule is any sign, I would not bet on it.

Nvidia has released the beast to close out the SUPER series, at least as far as we are aware at this time. The RTX 2080 SUPER is not simply a great replacement for the outgoing RTX 2080, but one of the three models which marked a shift in RTX, offering more performance at a more palatable price point.

When you can bring out new cards with more performance for less money, you win. Nvidia, you win this round and SUPER is here to stay.