They call it ‘fine wine’ – the concept of a PC component still delivering impressive performance years on from its release. Nvidia’s Turing architecture – the RTX 20 series cards – weren’t exactly well regarded at launch back in 2018 but with the RTX 2080 Ti, I’d say we’re looking at fine wine at its best. Its performance today battles it out with the recently released RTX 5060, it has more memory than the new Nvidia offering and its outputs don’t decline on PCIe gen 3-based PCs… because it is a PCIe gen 3 card. Despite its seven year vintage, it’s still a card that outperforms the current generation consoles and even taps into some (though not all) of Nvidia’s latest neural rendering technologies. This is indeed fine wine, but fine wine with a chaser, if you like.
All of which raises an interesting question: a used RTX 2080 Ti costs pretty much the same as an RTX 5060 – so does this make it worthy as a used purchase for a budget PC? Well, AMD’s upcoming RX 9060 XT launch might have something to say about that, but yesterday’s flagship is certainly causing a headache or two for today’s 50-series mainstream offering – and emphasises the importance of an appropriate hardware balance between compute power, RT and machine learning features available VRAM.
While the focus in this piece is about the RTX 2080 Ti, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the used market has a number of good options, all of them compliant with the DX12 Ultimate standard. AMD’s RX 6700 XT has more memory and is typically a fair amount cheaper second-hand. Meanwhile, the 16GB RX 6800 effectively solves the VRAM problem completely, but does tend to cost more than the 2080 Ti based on eBay completed sales results. In the video below, you’ll see how my benchmarking worked out with both of these AMD offerings, the RTX 5060 and the RTX 2080 Ti. Spoilers: the 2080 Ti wins on aggregate when put through our entire benchmarking suite, as the table below demonstrates. The video is worth watching for the most noteworthy results, however.
How it wins is quite fascinating. In dealing with rasterisation performance without VRAM constraints, the RTX 2080 Ti is effectively a ringer for the new RTX 5060 with many games operating at close to identical frame-rates. Ray tracing is another story: in some titles, the RTX 2080 Ti performs a lot better than RTX 5060. In other tests, 2080 Ti falls a touch short. The RTX 50-series Blackwell architecture seems to struggle with some RT titles, such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and F1 24. In these scenarios, the RTX 2080 Ti can be a runaway winner. While the video above highlights the benchmarks that interested me, the results of all of our tests are aggregated into the accompanying table.