Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I started my testing off with a few different synthetic benchmarks. I like these tests because while they don’t give us actual in game performance numbers, they are consistent and are normally a good look at the card to card performance ahead of the in game testing. Especially with the tests getting more specialized now with DX11 and DX12 focuses as well as different detail and resolutions. In 3DMark I ran all three Fire Strike tests which are all DX11 focused at different detail and resolutions. I wanted to mostly keep an eye on how the Strix RTX 2080 compares to the Founders Edition RTX 2080, but at the same time the GTX 1080 Ti as well. The Founders Edition RTX 2080 does have a slight overclock, but the Strix came in a little higher with the FE at 1800 MHz and the Strix at 1860 MHz boost clock as tested. The Strix does also have that software option to turn things up to 1890 MHz, but I ran the card out of the box. In the first test, you can see just how close the three cards are with the Strix outperforming the 1080 Ti FE by just a few points. Going up to the Extreme test the 1080 Ti FE pulled ahead and it stayed ahead in the Ultra test as well, both of those the Strix was slightly faster than the 2080 FE.

3DMark Time Spy is the DX12 focused test and the RTX cards have handled this better in previous reviews so I wasn’t surprised to see both 2080’s out ahead here but the gap between the 1080 Ti and the 2080 in both the performance and extreme settings was surprising.

The last set of tests were run in the Unigine based Superposition test. I ran this test four times with two different detail settings at 1080p and then 4k and even 8k for a look at the ultra-high resolution results. The Strix 2080 pulled ahead of the 1080 Ti FE in the lowest detail 1080p test and with the exception of the 8k test stayed ahead. Again though the gap between the two RTX 2080s and the GTX 1080 Ti FE was very very small in most of the tests.