NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti NVLink SLI Scaling Explored

by Shannon Robb — Tuesday, October 23, 2018, 01:52 PM EDT

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GeForce RTX 2080Ti NVLink SLI - 3DMark Time Spy And Fire Strike

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from Futuremark. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multithreading. Time Spy is designed to test the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the Futuremark Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards and other system resources driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

3DMark Time Spy

Direct X 12 Performance

3DMark Time Spy

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Performance scaling in Time Spy Extreme, which runs at 4K and uses DX12, is solid across the board, with the RTX and GTX cards trading blows. GT1 shows scaling in favor of the the 1080Tis with HB SLI at 97.81% vs. 94.93% for the RTX 2080 Tis. The GT2 test shows the RTX 2080 Ti cards with NVLink scaling by 96.01% vs. 95.23%, which while technically a win is essentially a tie and within the test's margin of error.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

The 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra benchmark tells a different story with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards pulling a clear win. GT1 shows the 2080 Ti cards scaling by 98.34% vs. the GeForce GTX 1080 Tis at 91.98%. GT2 shows again the RTX cards well ahead, with scaling of 93.61%, versus 85.80% with the 1080 Tis. The overall score with the RTX 2080 Ti cards scaled by 95.35%, whereas the GeForce GTX 2080 Ti's scaled by 88.17%.