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RPS Asks: are today’s RTX 3080 reviews giving you buyer’s remorse over the RTX 20 series?Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time.
Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time.
Nvidia’s newRTX 3080comes out tomorrow, and reviews are starting to hit the internet. Ours isn’t quite ready yet - it still needs a little more time in the benchmarking oven - but so far the praise has all been very glowing. And why wouldn’t it? When your initial pitch is twice the performance of theRTX 2080for the same amount of money, it’s effectively a slam dunk for Nvidia’s PR and marketing teams.
So, RPS asks: are all these RTX 3080 reviews giving you buyer’s remorse?
RPS Asks: are today’s RTX 3080 reviews giving you buyer’s remorse over the RTX 20 series?— Rock Paper Shotgun (@rockpapershot)September 16, 2020
RPS Asks: are today’s RTX 3080 reviews giving you buyer’s remorse over the RTX 20 series?
— Rock Paper Shotgun (@rockpapershot)September 16, 2020
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It’s been two years since the RTX 2080 came out, and at the time it was certainly an impressive-looking graphics card. While my Intel Core i5-8600K processor struggled to get the most out of it at 1920x1080, it was still capable of hitting at least 70fps on max settings at 1080p in my benchmarking suite, if not substantially higher around the 110fps mark. It also had more than enough power to play games at 60fps on max settings at 2560x1440, regardless of whether I had a Core i5 or Core i7 sitting inside my PC, and it was a good card for playing games on Medium to High settings at 4K, too.
It wasn’t that much of a bump over the outgoing GTX 1080, all told, but the addition and promise of all that shiny ray tracing tech still made the RTX 2080 a tantalizing proposition nonetheless. As it turns out, the number ofgames that actually support ray tracingand Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech right now is still pitifully small. Just how small, I hear you cry? There are 14 games that support ray tracing right now. 14 games! In two years! Madness.
Truth be told, I still think it will be a while before we start to see ray tracing become a standard addition to PC games, but the time it takes to get there is only going to get shorter now theXbox Series X / SandPS5have support for it as well (thanks, AMD). That’s still a fine thing for existing RTX 20 owners, but they also needn’t have bothered jumping in early, either.
It would be different if we were swimming in ray tracing and DLSS games that meant we could actually get some use out of the RTX-ness of the 20-series GPUs, but we’re not. Instead, we’re left with the biggest case of early adopter regret I think I’ve ever experienced during my time as a tech journalist.
AMD’sBig NaviGPUs can’t come soon enough, lemme tell ya.
