I had a fairly interesting development recently. I had bought two of these 2080 Ti's for testing and eventual gifting to my older brother (for some reason he thinks he needs a 2080 for a VR game he plays, and pinball). I noticed that the stuttering in AH3 (the little pauses) got to be shorter, but more frequent when I was running the NVlink. The scaling is more interesting, because I think the pauses will be eliminated when using only one card. The scaling is just over 50% and that's with everything on and running at 4k resolution.
I was running a benchmark when I ran into a problem that brought everything to a halt. The UPS I was using with my gaming system had a battery leak that ate completely through the UPS casing, the battery joiner, and the internal circuit board. That's a first. Worse, though, is that Windows 10 was surreptitiously installing an update (that I don't want yet) and when the system came to a halt it became unbootable. Restoring from a backup was pretty quick, but I had just never seen a UPS act like that. Fortunately, the UPS sits on a wooden floor. I can only imagine what synthetic carpet mixed with battery acid would do.
Anyway, I like the 2080 cards. I don't like the price. Nvidia has done away with SLI in favor of the NVlink system, which runs $79 just for the connector (not the $700 reported on YouTube). There are some combo deals that include the connector, but the performance improvements even with the latest driver change is not enough to warrant the upgrade. I may change my mind if the 980s I use give up, but for now they're just fine.
From what I am seeing the problems some of us, not all, are having with AH3 and the graphic pauses is related to DX11. I get the same thing in another game I play, which has DX11 and DX12 version, and it doesn't have pauses in 12 (and crashes) but it does with 11.
PCIe 4.0 is already hitting the streets, while PCIe 5.0 will be out next year. That will be interesting once the 3080 cards are out in two years. Until then, I'm happy with what I have.
