NVIDIA's message when unveiling its
GeForce RTX series of graphics card was crystal clear—the era of gaming with
real-time ray tracing has arrived, at least on the hardware and API side, with content to follow. That's all well and good, but the big question that is yet be answered is, how well do the new cards perform compared to
Pascal? A new
3DMark entry might provide a partial answer.
What appears to be a GeForce RTX 2080 or GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card has made another appearance in 3DMark, and specifically the
DirectX 12-based Time Spy test. It's not entirely clear which of those cards it is, as the entry lists it as having 8GB of memory and a 7,000MHz memory clock, specs that are the same both models.
Looking the performance numbers, we lean toward it being a GeForce RTX 2080, if the entry is in fact legitimate (it's not that difficult to spoof these sort of things, so keep that in mind). The card posted a Graphics score of 10,030. That's roughly on par with a mighty
Titan Xp, and a good clip faster than a
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
We plotted the score alongside our own collection of Time Spy benchmarks. Here's how the leaked GeForce RTX 2080 compares:
Bear in mind that the testbeds are obviously different, and so are the collection of drivers between the GeForce RTX 2080 and our own benchmark runs. So, we can throw the overall 3DMark score right out the window.
What's more interesting is the Graphics score. From the data we have been able to gather over the course of several reviews, the purported GeForce RTX 2080 tops them all, including the Titan Xp. It's also about 30 percent faster than an
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64.
If these numbers hold true when the actual reviews come out (ours included), it will be impressive stuff from NVIDIA's new generation of graphics cards. Bear in mind this is 'only' the GeForce RTX 2080—the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti figures to perform even better.
Whether scores like this and the ray tracing benefits are enough to justify the price premium remains to be seen. However, this leaked benchmark run is certainly encouraging.