Even the 2080 Ti can't hit 60 FPS in 3DMark Port Royal

Even the 2080 Ti can't hit 60 FPS in 3DMark Port Royal

UL Benchmarks, the formerly-known-as Futuremark arm of Underwriter's Laboratories, recently released a brand new arm of its 3DMark testing suite specifically designed to test the ray tracing capabilities of modern RTX-enabled graphics cards. It turns out that the benchmark is just as intensive as early in-game ray tracing testing would have us believe, as even with a system running a heavily overclocked 2080 Ti and paired with an Intel 9900K, the end result was an average FPS of just 51.

Although the Port Royal benchmark isn't officially available for consumers as of yet, it was released briefly to a number of overclockers at the recent Galaxy GOC 2018 overclocking contest. That saw some of the world's top overclockers go head to head to see who could push their configuration of 2080 Ti and 9900K to the maximum score possible in the new benchmark.

Ultimately, it was Swedish overclocker, Rauf, who stole the top spot, with a score of 11,069 and an average of 51 FPS throughout the benchmark's various demos and tests. He managed this by pushing the 2080 Ti's core clock speed to 2,640MHz and the memory to 2,088MHz. The 9900K was kept at stock, because ray tracing doesn't rely much on CPU speed at all.

Second place wasn't far behind. Duanin managed to get his 2080 Ti up to 2,565MHz on the core and 2,075Mhz on the memory, with others on the table coming in a little slower as you make your way down.

Overall though, this just shows how taxing the new, heavily reflective demo is. Especially since it was only running at 1,440P. We hesitate to think what a slideshow 4K would be. This also raises questions about how well ray tracing scales with multiple GPUs. Could SLI 2080 Tis do any better?