Conclusion

Conclusion

Wozers, MSI actually went rather ballsy with the Gaming X Trio, they dialed up the boost clock and increased the power limiter, all default settings. The end result is a better performing product, that still remains silent at very okay temperatures. The one deficit maybe is the increased power usage as the card uses 50 Watt more than reference. Though I doubt that anyone chucking down 1300 bucks would ever remotely worry about it. The Gaming X Trio is a bit of a beast really, it does perform well. You, however, will need to crank up all image quality settings and play your games in the highest resolutions to be able to notice that. At a more conservative resolution of 2560x1440, you're looking at 25% perf increases. However, in Ultra HD and some gnarly settings, you could hit that 40 to 50% additional performance seen over a reference 1080 Ti. At defaults, we noticed this product sits in that 1900~1950 MHz range depending on game title and limiters. The new Gaming X TRIO, however, has gotten thicker and longer in size alright. The cooling of this puppy is simply massive. But we'll talk about that in a second thought. Right now though all registers turn green for me, as it comes with an excellent silent cooling solution, the looks are very familiar but nice (albeit this is subjective of course), it has a very nice LED implementation. The reality remains that the differences in performance in-between all tweaked 2080 models Ti models are going to be negligible.

DX-R gaming and DLSS

So yes, I would have loved to show you some DXR (Raytracing) performance, but all that NVIDIA provided was an internal Star Wars Reflection demo you've probably already seen, which is lovely to see!, but simply is irrelevant of course to benchmark. Also, very cool that UL contacted us and allowed us to test and showcase where they are at with the Raytracing demo. You have seen an exclusive there, work in progress though! So yeah, that's it for Raytracing for now. Once we actually see games release them and once Microsoft releases DX-R (fall update) we'll create some additional content to show you the potential of the new RT cores as really, this release is all about the RT cores my jolly good friends. So I am not dismissing the RT cores here, as honestly, I am super excited about the technology and what it can do for image quality in gaming. It's just that I objectively cannot comment or give you an advise based on something we cannot test in an actual game (which what this is all about eh?).

That other feature then, Deep learning Supersampling. Totally lovely, really .. but here again we've been dealing with the fact that there is no software to test aside from precisely two titles, you've seen the results and image quality in this article with the help of Ultra HD videos. I'll say this though, despite we've only been able to visually inspect and measure one title, we are impressed by the technology as when you use DLSS, you don't need to enable AA in your shader engine anymore as DLSS takes care of that for you by using the Tensor cores, so that's completely offloaded and that brings in a good chunk of additional performance in return, that you'd normally miss out on. The technology in its current state, I can confirm that it is impressive. And with that out of the way, I need to close the primary new features and that DNA that is RTX and AI already and turn back to traditional rasterized shading. More relevant would be the EPIC infiltrator DLSS demo I showed you? I meant that's really good right? Plus it just runs much faster compared to TAA, that's win-win right there. 

Gaming performance

Face it, the RTX 2080 Ti is a beast. We're seeing some caps at lower resolution gaming, but for Ultra HD, the next step in performance has been made. Depending on title and workload you'll see 25% to maybe even 40% performance increases in this specific resolution. The RTX 2080 Ti really starts to flex muscle at or after a resolution of 2560x1440, anything below is normalized due to driver and processor bottlenecks. We cannot think of a game that won't run really good combined with the best image quality settings. The more difficult you make it on this card, the better it'll perform compared to last-gen products. Gaming you must do with at least a 24" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600 or better would be a nice fit. The 11 GB graphics memory is excellent, making the product very future proof. In terms of multi-GPU setups, Turing will support 2-way SLI, but really that's it and all. NVIDIA did not have the new NVLINK connector available, so we've not been able to test it. 

Aesthetics

The RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Tri has new looks. It sits in the Gaming line, was made a little darker to look at, and that works for me. The RGB lighting effects are funky to see. So yeah it has that a nice dark appeal with LED inclusion that has been done subtly and can be configured in any manner you prefer with Mystic Light software, the choice is yours. While I always will remain skeptical about backplates (they potentially can trap heat and thus warm up the PCB) MSI does have vents there. The flip-side is that they can look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage and, well, they can look nice as they can have a certain aesthetic appeal. I have to admit, this is looking very nice but looks are always personal, of course. So in the end, on looks, you certainly get that premium feel of detailed aesthetics and quality. 

Cooling & Noise Levels

Really good. Then again at 1.5 kg, you may expect proper cooling. The card tops out at roughly 73 Degrees C while gaming and you need to keep in mind that this is a factory tweaked product with increased power limiter. So that's not bad at all, especially considering the nice acoustics as this puppy remains very silent. We measured a 37~38 DBa range which means you can hardly hear the product, this is considered silent. So yes I agree, this card might look a bit thicker due to adding radiator surface area, it, however, does cool the TU102 really well.

Power Consumption

Any TU102 Turing GPU and thus graphics cards based on them are rated at roughly 260 Watt TDP under full stress. MSI, however, gave the boost clock 1755 MHz and increased that power limiter a bit, and that raises the TDP. We measured 315 Watts when gaming, which is 55 Watt over reference. If you are bothered by that, so be it. But if you would manually tweak a 2080 Ti yourself, you get the very same thing. A 650 Watt PSU would be a nice match for these cards but 700 Watts probably is better to be on the safe side. Remember - when purchasing a PSU, aim to double up in Wattage as your PSU is most efficient when it is at 50% load. Here, again, keep in mind we measure peak power consumption, the average power consumption is a good notch lower depending on GPU utilization. Also, if you plan to overclock the CPU/memory and/or GPU with added voltage, please do purchase a power supply with enough reserve. People often underestimate it, but if you tweak all three aforementioned variables, you can easily add 150 Watts to your peak power consumption budget as increasing voltages and clocks increase your power consumption.

Overclocking

The Gaming X Trio is already factory tweaked for you, so it has used up a bit of that reserve that for example, the founders edition did not use. As a result, you have less tweaking ranges available. If you crank open the power limiter and voltage you'll be able to add anything from 105 MHz to 135 MHz on that GPU. The memory we dialed down slightly but at +800 (=1600 Mhz effective) we have the GDDR6 memory running at 15.600 MHz (effective data rate).  With these settings, you'll hover at a ~2050 MHz boost and have plenty of memory bandwidth, and that will increase your performance. With a maxed out tweak you are looking at another 10% extra perf. Very exciting is the new OC Scanner functionality. Honestly, it needs some more development and refinement, but I can see this become the primary methodology for automated overclocking in the future. Right now it is a little conservative though, but yeah, very promising. 

Concluding

The new 11 GB memory enabled GeForce RTX 2080 Ti TRIO From MSI offers a step up in additional performance seen from the founder edition from NVIDIA, it remains to be a relative step, to be honest. A lot is regulated by many limiters. None the less, this is a kick-ass card alright (and it better be at this price tag). The Trio positions itself in-between the Gaming X and the Lightning and while we're not sure we'll ever see another lightning, the new Trio certainly has loads of appeal. We expect the card to retail at a 1300 EUR/USD range, while I would recommend this product overall as sound hardware, I am continuously fighting with that price level (as set by NVIDIA), as it is just a crazy amount of money.

I need to remind you that this is a long card due to that cooler, please do make sure it actually fits inside your chassis. Other than that the card is properly built and oozes quality. But granted, it's a big and heavy piece of machinery alright! Tweaking performance is good, yet remains limited to the ranges that Nvidia dictates. Your stress gaming temperature will sit at a nice 73 Degrees C threshold, which is excellent considering what GPU lies under the hood. The 2080 Ti seen from a 1080 Ti purely based on shading performance is impressive, but the big question remaining is that extra 25 to 40% extra performance worth the price tag? Purely based on rasterized/shaded game performance I would say no. The extra money needs to be found in the RT and Tensor cores, thus raytracing, DLSS and everything new that will follow from the new cores. DLSS I am savvy about, at least from what I have seen at the NVIDIA event and here with FFXV, so that is a limited scope of software to form an objective opinion on. Currently, I, however, do not know if the number of RT cores are fast enough or plentiful enough to be able to produce fast enough numbers for hardware-assisted ray tracing in rasterized games, and that is my biggest dilemma for this conclusion. I will say this though, Raytraced gaming blew me away when I briefly tested it on the NV event. It is the dawn of a new era and likely the path that defines the next decade of gaming. But we need games to support it before we can say anything solid about it. 

You've seen the numbers, for Ultra HD gamers this product works out well, really well. In closing, we feel the MSI Gaming X Trio edition RTX 2080 Ti is a properly designed enthusiast class product. As stated, this card is very silent and does manage to do that at very acceptable cooling levels. You have seen the thermal images, these show good decent results as the card throughout all locations remains at relatively proper temps. If you can pick it up for the right price then we can wholeheartedly recommend it, but yeah well .. I think I said enough about that. For now we need Raytracing and DLSS gaming titles for this product to make more sense (as really that's where the extra cash is spent), in the upcoming month though we should see a decent number of hybrid Raytraced games, we think the adoption of DLSS will go faster (which is a really solid feature bringing you good AA at virtually no rendering cost). Very nice, this is a gorgeous card, but merely an option for the ones that are actually able to buy it, of course.

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