As promised in our last entry, The End of an Era…, where we bid farewell to SLI, RTX2080Ti Benching has begun!  Noteworthy is that for all of these tests, absolute maximum settings were used.  In addition, the new Nvidia GSync support for FreeSync monitors, introduced in driver 417.71, was on.  The main goal for the testing was to test the hypothesis that a single RTX2080Ti was “enough” for a 60Hz 4k panel even though in many cases it would trail the absolute power of SLI 1080Ti. The spoiler alert here is  generally yes.  Realistically AA should be turned off.  For these tests, again, everything was cranked up.  Turning AA off would have pushed all results to a solid 60fps, which is a pretty reasonable trade at 4k for the advantage of running a single card. On to the tests!

First up is Metro 2033 Redux at 4k maximum settings , which of course remains a nightmare.  Performance here was not great, with average fps at 39, peak at 177, and low at 5.

Options: Resolution: 3840 x 2160; Quality: Very High; SSAA: On; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Off; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On:

Next up is Metro 2033 Last Light Redux at 4k maximum settings , which is also a nightmare!  Performance here again was rough with average fps at 36, peak at 118, and low at 4.

Options: Resolution: 3840 x 2160; Quality: Very High; SSAA: On; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Off; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On:

Unigine Heaven 4 remains a solid test, which is pretty remarkable after all of these years.  Plus it has trippy music! Results here are better with an overall score of 1265, average fps of 50, peak of 164 and minimum of 25:

Back to gaming we have Rise of the Tomb Raider. Another solid result here with an absolute low of 26 across all modules, high of 126 and an overall test average of 72fps:

And last but not least (for now) we wrap up this session with GTA V.  The hypothesis holds up reasonably well here as well with the low point at 36fps, the high at 91fps and an average of 50s to 60s for most of the test: