Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It is a joke I have been wanting to use since the 2060 and 2070 Supers came out, but I could not since we needed to save it for the 2080 Super!
The Breakdown
The RTX 2080 Super is something of a tame launch, compared to the previous Supers.
The 2060 Super had 13% more shaders than the non-Super; the 2070 Super had 11% more than its counterpart; and the performance increases matched those numbers. The 2080 Super has only 4% more shaders, and 4% is too small to notice. nVidia tried to help increase the performance by releasing the 2080 Super with better VRAM and higher clocks, but that will only do so much. In the end, the new 2080 Super is roughly 7% faster than the 2080 non-Super.
Still, the 2080 Super is being launched at the same price as the old 2080, so you are getting a 7% increase in performance for free. Well, for $700, so not very free. In fact, $700 is a lot of $$$! Okay, what you are getting is a slightly better card, for no extra cost!
So for those lucky folks who have a sweet $700 budget for a new card right about now, the 2080 Super is yours for the taking.
Going forward
We will be replacing the non-Super 2080 with a 2080 Super. This applies to the SLI options in the higher tiers as well.
Also, the 3900X description has been updated to bring some smart words into our lexicon. Our thanks to the user who emailed us with the improvement to the existing joke.