Nvidia has a habit of playing fast and loose with the truth. Anyone remember the GT 1030 DDR4? The latest proclamation from Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang goes a bit far, even by team green standards.
During a presentation at GTC China 2019, one of Jensen’s slides showcased the hard-to-believable: the claim that the Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Max-Q (the Max-Q version, mind you, not the desktop iteration) is faster than then GPUs found in the 9th gen consoles. This claim is a bit too far-fetched. For starters, the general consensus is that the PS5 and Xbox Series X will feature graphics hardware that’s as fast or faster than existing Navi 10 parts such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT.
Where does the RTX 2080 Max-Q slot into this equation? Max-Q variants of Turing cards are clocked substantially lower than their regular counterparts, resulting in lower performance stats. The GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q performs more or less in the range of the notebook RTX 2070, which in turn is just about as fast as a desktop GTX 1080. That’s a far cry from the RTX 2080, and considerably weaker than RX 5700 XT. If Nvidia has information we’re not privy to (and, well, they probably do), this may hint that the ninth-gen consoles aren’t nearly as powerful as expected. On the other hand, it could just be Jensen making a boast he can’t back up with hard figures.
