Best RTX 2080 Graphics Cards For 2024 – GPU Buying Guide

How We Choose

Regularly we’re asked the question of how we choose which GPU is the absolute best option for each category, the answer is always the same. Our team of hard-working, gaming/PC enthusiasts spend hours of endless research looking across the latest and most up-to-date technology in the quest to give informed and accurate recommendations in our guide pages.

Further to research, the team set strict goals and criteria which each product must meet before it goes into what we like to call, the final contender’s list:

• Brand must be trustworthy and established
• Hardware must be reliable and built for longevity
• We must always try to provide maximum value for money

For the categories just mentioned above, we chose the most meaningful criteria to filter out the best possible choices. The following are the categories we eventually select for each card, hopefully resulting in a product for every type of consumer:

• Top Performance – Performance is something we take very seriously here at WEPC because ultimately it’s what we all want, the best performing hardware components available in our budget range. It’s one of our main priorities here and across the board.
• Top All-Rounder – The top all-rounder must do pretty much what it says on the tin, it must have good, everything basically. Good performance levels, good cooling, well priced, and aesthetically pleasing.
• Best Budget – The budget pick is designed for people looking to get the most out of their money. The products we recommend aren’t just cheap however, they must also live up to the 3 main priorities in any best-of guide: Value for money, reliable and performance.
• Best Balanced – A “balanced” pick, balancing things like performance and cooling to make a good middle-road pick for those who want a well-balanced graphics card.

Things To Consider

How will these cards perform?

So, as mentioned above, the RTX 20series have been powered by Nvidia’s new Turing architecture which brings newly enhanced AI graphics and real-time ray tracing to the table. Nvidia claims this gives the new range of GPUs up to 6x more performance than previous-generation GPUs and brings incredible new levels of realism and immersion to your gaming. This all sounds very attractive, however at present, there are only a handful of games that utilize features such as ray tracing and DLSS, so justifying a purchase right now might seem fairly difficult.

Despite there not being a massive product base to test the new technology of RTX on, there are still many scenarios we can test this card on to see how it performs against the competition. We sampled the 2080 across a number of different games and platforms in several different graphics settings and resolutions and found the card handled itself very well. FPS across the board was extremely good, 4k at 60FPS was easily achievable as was 100+ for lower resolutions. The temp of the cards obviously reflects the quality of the fans and the heatsink but across the board, all cards were pretty quiet and very efficient. Most did not exceed 75°C when being put through relative stress tests and gaming scenarios which is reassuring considering many of them are being overclocked as well. All the RTX cards have been equipped with the Type-C adaptor, which if you don’t know is the connection needed for VR. The RTX range also makes use of the world’s fastest GDDR6 memory which in turn provides the 2080 with the power it needs to push everything else aside.

All in all the 2080 is a top-of-the-range graphics card with all the mod cons you would need to future-proof you for the next couple of years. If you plan ahead, the 2080 is years ahead of its rivals.

How does it compare to the GTX 1080?

Many people will probably be wondering at this stage how the RTX 2080 compares with the people’s champion, the GTX 1080 ti. The 1080 was widely considered to be the pinnacle of all GPU’s so we were very interested to see how the 2080 would compare. To our surprise, the results were very similar, if not slightly edging towards the 2080 which in honesty we didn’t expect. The first thing which was tested was FPS across several different games and the 2080 leveled or beat the 1080 ti on everything apart from CS:GO.

For the higher GPU demanding games, the 2080 edged it in some cases and just fell short in others. Considering the 1080Ti comes with 11GB of RAM you would expect the performance to be leaning towards a 1080Ti win. However, thanks to newly improved GDDR6 memory which is now across all the RTX 20 series range, the gap has been narrowed dramatically.

As far as price is concerned, the 1080Ti is still more expensive whilst being outdated and outperformed (in some scenarios) by the newer RTX 2080 cards. With this, I can only see the 1080Ti taking a back seat in sales whilst a new champion emerges.

Table Key and Terms

• Clock Speed – Clock speed refers to the internal, “core” clock of the graphics processor. The higher the clock speed, the better your performance.
• VRAM – VRAM for anyone who doesn’t know, refers to the ‘Video RAM’ or memory available at your GPU’s disposal. Discrete GPUs tend to come with their own VRAM– in the 1080’s case, this is GDDR5X VRAM, which is a bit faster than the industry standard GDDR5. The RTX series comes with the latest GDDR6 which is much faster than anything we’ve seen previously.
• Overclock – Overclocking refers to pushing the clock speed of a component higher to get more performance. Usually, this is done by the user, but the cards we’re listing here today all boast “factory overclocks”, which is overclocking done by the manufacturer and proven stable. You can manually overclock further but it is none recommendable.