Palit RTX 2080 Super JetStream Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

Unfortunately, the card we tested today isn’t even on the Palit website, let alone listed at any retailer for pre-order. However, looking at comparable cards, the price is sure to be somewhere between £720 and £800. I would guess somewhere in the middle at £750. That’s quite a lot of money, and around £100 more than a comparable factory overclocked 3rd party GTX 1080 Ti. However, spending that extra £100-ish makes a lot of sense vs buying the “older” generation 1080 Ti. I’ll explain below.

Overview

The RTX cards land in gamers hands this week, and that’s a very special thing. It seems when I started this job many years ago, new GPUs were flying at us almost weekly. A new generation launch never seemed more than a few months away either. By the time you finished reviewing all the cards of one gen, the next way here. However, the GTX 1080 Ti set quite a performance standard and has remained unchallenged by AMD for some time. The card has been out for what feels like a lifetime in tech years. However, no Nvidia are purely beating their own record and competing with themselves. Hopefully, AMD has something big in the pipeline to come and fight back, and keep pushing the market further forwards for all gamers. However, that seems some way off at this time.

RTX On

So, why the heck should you buy an RTX 2080 when you can get pretty damn similar performance from a 1080 Ti? Furthermore, a 1080 Ti is around £100 cheaper brand new. The 1080 Ti has given us everything it can. There are no more big performance gains to be found on that chipset. The RTX 2080 is brand spanking new, with infant drivers, and virtually no games on the market to take full advantage of it. Sure, this week we’ll see some patched to add DLSS support, and next month RayTracing will be unlocked with the new DirectX update from Microsoft. Good things are on the horizon for RTX series cards, and I suspect while the performance is similar now, that will become a wider canyon as the software matures, and I suspect that will happen very quickly.

Performance

This card runs cool and it runs quietly. Even when pushing the 4K benchmarks, it just didn’t feel like the card was working as hard as I expected. With this in mind, I’m confident it has more performance to give us. Of course, this is likely related to the power draw issues, for which we know there will be a driver patch soon. With developers tweaking their games, the improved DirectX coming from Microsoft, and Nvidia fine-tuning and optimising their drivers, we will absolutely be retesting this and any other RTX cards in the coming weeks.

Future Proofing

It’s a shame that I had no real RTX or DLSS benchmarks to present you with. Sure, Nvidia provided demos that did, but since there’s nothing else to compare them to as they only run on RTX cards, it’s a bit of a fruitless endeavour at this time, but will make sense in upcoming reviews and features. Andy’s been busying away with some of them though, and it’ll be on our YouTube channel if it isn’t already. RayTracing looks to push the innovation envelope well in terms of technology, be we’re as eager as you all to see the performance of it too. DLSS is the new AA technique that I’ve seen working at 4K and it works fantastically in Final Fantasy XV. AA is hard at 4K, but the new deep learning supersampling is a huge innovation and one we’re also eager to explore more in the coming weeks.

Should I Buy One?

There’s the elephant in the room here, the price. The card isn’t cheap, and it’s at least another £100 of the 1080 Ti, which is also an amazing GPU. However, I think the price isn’t too much over the last gen, even if my wallet doesn’t agree with that statement. Furthermore, it includes a nice set of new and innovative features for your investment. With the new VR connection, RayTracing, DLSS, and more, the card has more future proofing potential. I wouldn’t upgrade my 1080 Ti to this just yet, but those who are buying their first gaming PC, upgrading from 9-series cards or below, or from low-to-mid 10-series cards; the performance increase and extra technologies are going to be one heck of an upgrade. There’s a new performance king in town, it’s called RTX, and honestly, it looks like it’s only just getting warmed up for the fight.

4K Video Review