DON’T PRE-ORDER RTX 2080 TI UNTIL YOU READ THIS!

Yesterday, I released a video after getting super hyped about the new Nvidia RTX 20 series, and I still am excited, but after thinking things through, I realized I may have rode the hype train a little too far, so I wanted to make this video talking about why you might want to wait to pre-order or if you do pre-order, the things you really want to make sure you understand before doing so. So let’s hop right into it.  

The first issue is that performance is a huge question mark. It’s almost like Nvidia was trying to distract us with all of this talk about 8x teraflops of ray-tracing performance, while not showing us any real benchmarks of currently popular titles.

These new GPU’s have all kinds of cool new features. 12 NM manufacturing. Way more ray-tracing cores. Tensor cores. NGX Neural network for AI Pixel Prediction, that should in theory really improve ultra high resolution gaming performance… But how much of a performance improvement we really don’t know… all of that is in theory, and until we see some rock solid benchmarks, then we really need to keep our hype in check. Yes, for sure these new graphics card should be at a minimum 20-40% faster.

But these cards are at a super premium price point, unless you’re trying to play on high resolution or at highest possible framerates (or a combination of the two) then the 1000 series cards are probably going to be a WAY better bang for the buck.

The other issue is that currently all I can find is Nvidia offering the founder’s edition version of the cards that come with a factory overclock, which is cool, but I plan on overclocking the cards on my own anyway… So if you’re on a budget, paying $100-200 more for a factory overclock makes zero sense when you can just overclock the non-founders version and probably get identical levels of performance for less money.

I personally want the most possible performance because I hate losing games because of low frame rates. When playing competitive games, I want the best chance at success regardless of price. So if you’re like me and you have money, go ahead and pre-order, but if you’re at all on a budget, then at very least make sure you pre-order from a store that has a good return policy so if it turns out that they aren’t really worth the insane price, then you can easily return it. Also, I would recommend you wait until the non-founders edition becomes available for $100-200 less and save yourself some money on what is essentially an identical card as far as I can tell at this point.