“Build it, and they will come” must be NVIDIA’s thinking behind their latest consumer-focused GPU: the RTX 2080 Ti, which has been released alongside the RTX 2080. Following on from the Pascal architecture of the 1080 series, the 2080 series is based on a new Turing GPU architecture which features Tensor cores for AI (thereby potentially reducing GPU usage during machine learning workloads) and RT cores for ray tracing (rendering more realistic images). Unfortunately, there aren’t (m)any games that make use of these capabilities so the $1200 price tag on the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition is difficult to justify. The 2080 Ti also features Turing NVENC which is far more efficient than CPU encoding and alleviates the need for casual streamers to use a dedicated stream PC. On paper the 2080 Ti has 4352 CUDA cores, a base/boost clock of 1350/1545 MHz, 11GB of GDRR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 616GB/s. The upshot is that it has around a 30% faster effective speed than the 1080 Ti, which at 18 months old continues to offer comparable value for money and currently dominates the high-end gaming market. Professional users such as game developers or 4K gamers may find value in the 2080 Ti but for typical users (@1080p), prices need to drop substantially before the 2080 Ti has much chance of widespread adoption.[Sep '18GPUPro]
