NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080/RTX 2080 Ti: Ethereum Mining Results

Introduction

I know, I know... 'Anthony, why the HELL are you writing an article about the new GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti and their mining performance'. It seems ridiculous, but it only takes me a few hours to run the benchmarks and collate the data, and then I can cover it from the fan of cryptocurrency mining performance.

The new Turing GPU architecture is quite an improvement with shader performance through the roof to the point of 35-50% performance gains between the GTX 1080 Ti and new RTX 2080 Ti. It also packs super high bandwidth GDDR6 memory technology, which starts at 14Gbps of bandwidth. Both the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti feature GDDR6 at 14Gbps, but the RTX 2080 has 8GB versus the 11GB on the RTX 2080 Ti. Both are overclockable, too.

I'm not going to do a full mining suite of benchmarks and flood you, as this is just a 'hey everyone, this is what Ethereum mining performance is like on the new RTX series cards, and now I'm out of here'. Check out the charts, and then we can compare just how good Turing is versus Pascal, Vega, and Polaris.

In the benchmark I'm only going to be using the RTX Founders Edition cards with the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, in both stock and overclocked settings. I'm using our GPU test bed that packs an Intel Core i7-8700K and ran Claymore's Dual GPU Miner v11.9, the very latest version of Claymore.

But there's something to note: even the latest version of Claymore doesn't have support for the new Turing GPU architecture, so give it a few weeks and especially over the coming months, we'll see tuned Claymore versions ready for the additional GPU horsepower that Turing offers. Not that you'd run around buying RTX 2080/2080 Ti cards for mining, that's absurd.

On with the Ethereum mining benchmarks!

Ethereum Mining Performance: RTX 2080/2080 Ti

Turing Is An Ethereum Mining BEAST

I'm not going to do a full mining suite of benchmarks and flood you, as this is just a 'hey everyone, this is what Ethereum mining performance is like on the new RTX series cards, and now I'm out of here'. Check out the charts, and then we can compare just how good Turing is versus Pascal, Vega, and Polaris.

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In the benchmark I'm only going to be using the RTX Founders Edition cards with the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, in both stock and overclocked settings. I'm using our GPU test bed that packs an Intel Core i7-8700K and ran Claymore's Dual GPU Miner v11.9, the very latest version of Claymore.

But there's something to note: even the latest version of Claymore doesn't have support for the new Turing GPU architecture, so give it a few weeks and especially over the coming months, we'll see tuned Claymore versions ready for the additional GPU horsepower that Turing offers. Not that you'd run around buying RTX 2080/2080 Ti cards for mining, that's absurd.

Seriously, out of the box Ethereum mining performance of 50MH/s is insane. Even with the HBM2 memory on the Radeon RX Vega 64 it was really only able to push 38-40MH/s out of the box and 42MH/s when using the AMD blockchain optimized drivers/Compute mode enabled.

Even an overclocked TITAN Xp (which costs the same as the RTX 2080 Ti) 'only' does 43MH/s when overclocked (37MH/s stock) while the GTX 1080 Ti does 32MH/s out of the box. So if we want to compare the GTX 1080 to the RTX 2080 Ti in ETH mining performance we're looking at 32MH/s versus 50MH/s with out-of-the-box performance. Turing will only mature under newer versions of these miners, too.

But when we have the 11GB of GDDR6 overclocked on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, we see the Ethereum mining performance scale up incredibly high, hitting 55MH/s. This is nearly twice the performance of the GTX 1080 TI, which is quite incredible.

Final Thoughts

Don't Buy RTX For Mining, I Mean It

Just don't.

Seriously, the new GeForce RTX series graphics cards are purely aimed at the enthusiast gamers who want beyond 4K 60FPS with the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The GeForce RTX 2080 is a slightly-better-than GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp graphics card, but the new RTX 2080 Ti is a beast. Gamers will love it and if you're still mining, it provides the best single card Ethereum mining performance I've ever seen.

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Especially when you consider that the TITAN Xp cost $1199 before NVIDIA revealed the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at the same $1199 price, with the TITAN Xp only pushing 40-43MH/s maximum when its 11GB GDDR5X was overclocked past 12Gbps. But the new RTX 2080 Ti ships with 11GB GDDR6 that starts at 14Gbps and can be pushed to 16Gbps, giving us the huge 53-55MH/s Ethereum mining performance.

Bitmain has just announced their upcoming next-gen 7nm ASIC chip is in mass production, so buy that. If you're going to plonk down $1199 per mining card, just spend up big on an ASIC miner. If you don't want to spend that much money, SAPPHIRE sells 8 x dual-GPU mining machines that will give you 300MH/s easy.

This article was never something where I was going to say "whoa, buy the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for mining" but more of a "hey this is a next-gen graphics card, how is it in something that was super popular (mining) over the last 12 months". Please do not rush out and buy GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards in bulk to mine, get them to game at insane 3440x1440 120FPS+ and 4K 60FPS+.

As for the technology side of the Turing GPU and GDDR6, even in its untuned-for-mining state the two new technologies show how far their legs can stretch on mining. 55MH/s is crazy considering the GTX 1080 Ti couldn't get above 40MH/s. Turing and GDDR6 FTW.