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Nvidia’s RTX Turing GPUs benchmarked in 3DMark’s new ray tracing test

We put the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2060 to the test in the first standardised ray tracing benchmark

3DMark DirectX Raytracing

The 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark is available to the public and we can start testing our new Nvidia graphics cards. Since the Nvidia RTX 20-series cards were introduced late last year, we’ve been relying on Battlefield V, the only game capable of DXR at the moment, to test the Turing architecture’s specialised silicon. But no longer!

Finally free from the yoke of the Origin launcher, we now have access to UL’s 3DMark Port Royal benchmark: a run consisting of a whole bunch of alien critters, fancy robots, space goop, and more reflections than you can shake a ray at. It’s a rather intensive piece of software, and the highly-reflective, suitably sci-fi scene is proving tough going for even Nvidia’s $1,200 ray tracing Turing flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti.

If you don’t know, real-time ray tracing is a rendering technique that traces rays of light as they are blasted every which way in any given scene. This negates the need for reflection and lighting workarounds, allowing for accurate reflections, shiny materials, and life-like lighting. For a long time it has been considered the endgame for gaming graphics, or at least it’s expected to be for a while anyways.

But now that we’ve got a totally stable and industry comparable run, let’s take a look at the results:

The RTX 2080 Ti manages to hit a score of 7,925, or the more ubiquitous value of 37 fps. From the TU102 GPU down the Turing product stack performance scales linearly as you might have expected. The RTX 2080 scores 5,986, or 28 fps; and the RTX 2060 scores 3,729, or 17 fps.

Read more: Here’s our Nvidia RTX 2060 review

We don’t have an RTX 2070 to hand right now for testing, but we’re working on it. There’s a hit squad of trained killers out there poaching us a wild TU106 as we speak.

RTX 2060 RTX 2080 RTX 2080 Ti
GPU TU106 TU104 TU102
Die size 445mm2 545mm2 754mm2
CUDA Cores 1,920 2,944 4,352
RT Cores 30 46 68
Tensor Cores 240 368 544

The RTX 2080 Ti performs 32% better than the RTX 2080. Meanwhile the RTX 2080 pulls ahead of the RTX 2060 by 61%.

Expreview managed to get a Titan RTX into the run, which managed a score of 8,255, or 38fps. And if you are wondering just how capable NVLink(ed) RTX 2080 Ti’s are getting on, this powerful duo scores 14,861, or 69 fps. That’s very nearly double the score of an individual RTX 2080 Ti – little of that second card’s compute power is going to waste.