NVIDIA Teases GeForce RTX 2080 Performance Numbers, Announces Ansel RTX

Concluding their Gamescom festivities for their newly-introduced GeForce RTX 20-series, NVIDIA has revealed a bit more about the hardware, its features, and its expected performance this evening. Tonight NVIDIA is announcing the new Ansel RTX features in GeForce Experience, as well as some game performance metrics for the GeForce RTX 2080 up against the GeForce GTX 1080. After recent hands-on demos featuring real-time raytracing, NVIDIA is offering some numbers for out-of-the-box and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) performance in traditionally rendered games.

Starting with NVIDIA’s DLSS – and real-time raytracing for that matter – we already know of the supported games list. What they are disclosing today are some face-value 4K performance comparisons and results. For DLSS, for now we can only say that it uses tensor core-accelerated neural network inferencing to generate what NVIDIA is saying will be high-quality super sampling-like anti aliasing. Though for further technical information, this is a project NVIDIA has been working on for a while, and they have published some blogs and papers with some more information on some of the processes used. At any rate, the provided metrics are sparse on settings or details, and notably measurements include several games rendered in HDR (though HDR shouldn't have a performance impact).

Otherwise, NVIDIA presented a non-interactive Epic Infiltrator 4K demo that was later displayed on the floor, comparing Temporal Anti Aliasing (TAA) to DLSS, where the latter provided on-average near-identical-or-better image quality but at a lower performance cost. In this case, directly improving framerates. To be perfectly honest, I spent the entire floor time talking with NVIDIA engineers and driver/software developers, so I have no pictures of the floor demo (not that anything less than a direct screenshot will really do it justice). Ultimately, the matter of DLSS is somewhat nuanced and there isn’t much we can add at the moment.

Overall, the idea is that even in traditionally rasterized games without DLSS, the GeForce RTX 2080 brings around 50% higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1080 under 4K HDR 60Hz conditions. Because this excludes real-time raytracing or DLSS, this would be tantamount to ‘out of the box’ performance. Though there were no graphics settings or driver details to go with these disclosed framerates, so I'm not sure I'd suggest reading into these numbers and bar charts one way or another.

Lastly, NVIDIA announced several new features, filters, and supported games for GeForce Experience’s Ansel screenshot feature. Relating to GeForce RTX, one of the features is Ansel RT for supported ray-traced games, where a screenshot can be taken with a very high number of rays, unsuitable for real-time but not an issue for static image rendering.

Ansel RTX also leverages a similar concept to the tensor core accelerated DLSS with ‘AI Up-Res’ super resolution, which also works for games not integrated with Ansel SDK.

In terms of the GeForce RTX performance, this is more-or-less a teaser of things to come. But as always with unreleased hardware, judgement should be reserved until objective measurements and further details. We will have much more to say when the time comes.