NVIDIA's RTX 4090 was a massively
powerful GPU with massive power consumption to match something that's
been making headlines since before launch with or without combusting
adapter cables now the RTX 4080 is here
and NVIDIA claims that it's going to double the performance of the previous
generation which would put it dangerously close to the RTX 4090s
performance level and what they say will be a much lower power draw and yet
NVIDIA's claims were far higher than the power draw we actually see
the kind of lie that I don't mind hearing the question now is can this
thing live up to those performance claims or at twelve hundred dollars well
the 40 series inflated price tags make it a skip-it generation like the RTX 20
series cards it's only one way to find out
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thank you the RTX 4080 16 gig or I guess
I don't really need to call it that anymore the 4080 has roughly 60 percent
of the Cuda cores compared to the bigger 4090 with slightly lower clocks to go
with them this is coupled with a 256 bit instead of a 384-bit memory bus which
means effective bandwidth is cut to just two-thirds given that the starting price
is roughly two-thirds of the 40-90 the math is mathing although the rated total
Graphics power is a bit higher than you'd expect given the spec Cuts still
it's the same 320 watt tgp as the outgoing RTX 3080. so if we're gaining
performance like NVIDIA says we are we're not paying for it there at least
in theory let's test it in practice we
grab the RTX 4080 along with its predecessor and what we consider to be
the closest competing gpus in terms of price and performance and slap them into
our 13th gen core bench to give them the best chance to stretch their legs
starting with non-ray Trace 4K the RTX
4080 pulls a respect 25 lead over the RTX 3090 TI in Forza Horizon 5 and
nearly reaches 80 percent of the RTX 4090s performance which puts it on solid
footing out of the gate f-122 sees the 6950 XT pulling close thanks to the
Monstrous traditional rendering performance that cart has and the 3090
TI closes the Gap substantially thanks to its greater memory bandwidth the 3090
TI's performance carries over to cyberpunk somewhat but the other cards
fall behind NVIDIA's 40 series cards Hitman 3 sees the RTX 4090 pull
significantly ahead of the 4080 again likely thanks to its memory bandwidth as
the 3090 TI and 6950xt both trade blows
in this title Modern Warfare 2 pushes the 4080 back again compared to the 4090
but it's still commanding that roughly 50 lead over its predecessor and sits
comfortably ahead of the 3090 TI and 6950xt older titles like Red Dead
Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider both display similar results
across the board with the RTX 4080 clearly topping the last generation's
best cards but trailing the 4090 by about 30 percent 1440p results are
unsurprisingly much tighter thanks to the lighter load it places on the GPU
although not in the way you might expect while the 4080 closes in on the 4090 the
other gpus remain where they were relative to the 4K results suggesting
that it's only the RTX 4090 that's CPU Bound in these tests there are cases
like cyberpunk and Modern Warfare 2 where the extra horsepower still makes a
big difference but for users of 1440p displays and especially in older titles
like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider
the RTX 4080 may be more than enough to
achieve close to 40 90 level performance while costing substantially less money
and drawing substantially less power which does also cost money we'll get to
the power draw but first Ray tracing this is AMD's Achilles heel and it shows
even in Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the 6950 XT is only roughly equal to the
lower tier RTX 3080. even in this older title NVIDIA's new RT cores appear to
perform slightly faster than the 3090 TI's giving the 4080 a broader lead than
it had in traditional rendering f-122 by comparison had the 4080 lose relative
performance against the Ford 90 versus when Ray tracing was turned off but it
pulls ahead substantially from the RTX 3080 making for frame rates that are
playable at 4K rather than cinematic cyberpunk unfortunately remains
cinematic on all of our cards at 4K with Ray tracing enabled though it's here
that we really do see the RTX 4080 pull over double the performance of its
predecessor and AMD's 6950xt and while
dlss 3.0 is still early days it appears that the two cards handle its frame
generation roughly the same way which is unsurprising but we had to test it to be
sure for the same reasons as 1440p rendering performance the RTX 4080 seems
to benefit more from dlss overall than the 4090 does thanks to the latter
becoming more CPU bound and this is something we should see more of as the
rest of the lineup continues to launch just like we recently launched these
various Nazi Channel hoodies on ltdstore.com they feel like stealth
hoodies but they're anything but moving on to productivity the RTX 4080 is
nearly double the performance of the 3080m blender rendering thanks both to
the additional and upgraded RT cores and it seems to come within three quarters
of the speed of the 4090. DaVinci Resolve favors the 4090 by about a
minute with the 4080 coming in just a little slower than the 3090 TI however
its addition of av1 encoding means that any 40 series GPU I mean any of them is
going to make your PC sub substantially faster at this kind of rendering
compared to any of the other gpus we've tested here Matlab GPU bench is NVIDIA
only but we can see that depending on the algorithm the RTX 4080 can come
within spitting distance of the 4090 in single Precision or be a good 40 behind
in double Precision either way it's consistently well ahead of the RTX 3090
TI and 3080 making it an excellent choice for GPU compute it's less
clear-cut for topaz AI where our test Suite finished soon around the 4080 than
the 3090 TI and within 10 minutes of the 4090 but AMD actually pulled ahead here
suggesting that topaz is geared more towards raw GPU compute than AMD's AI
accelerating tensor cores or at least the AI model we used was finally
specviewperf puts the RTX 4080 in the good overall position handling
outperforming both the RTX 3080 and 3090 TI although AMD pulls off some wins and
Katia Creo energy medical and especially Siemens NX though the latter is likely
because that version that's used in spec viewperf doesn't support acceleration on
NVIDIA yet power consumption has been a Hot Topic since the earliest rumors of
the RTX 40 series launch and the RTX 4090 proved our concerns were valid
however the RTX 4080 is
surprisingly tame yeah during our testing it almost never reached its 320
watt rated total Graphics power instead hovering around the 300 watt Mark or
usually lower we were so confused by this that we asked NVIDIA what was up
and they responded by saying Oh Yeah we actually we're changing what tgp means
sure okay
so what did they say basically tgp has
popularly been thought of as a power Target until recently it's the power
level that the GPU tried to adhere to when under load opportunistic boost
meant that gpus would often Spike higher for short periods but usually settled in
around their tgp rating now tgp is being
looked at more like a power limit the maximum the card should hit under normal
conditions and NVIDIA's built themselves a buffer Igor's lab recently published
an article showing this in Greater depth with the RTX 4090 which I'll have linked
below if you want to check it out NVIDIA themselves claimed that the RTX 4080
draws roughly 251 Watts on average while
gaming though it's closer to 300 watts at 4K depending on the game and yeah
even when running a power virus we couldn't get the 4080 to go much higher
than the rated 320 Watts despite the GPU load remaining High and the core clocks
remaining above 2 gigahertz this leads to some interesting questions because
each and every RTX 4880 you've tested has had a massively overbuilt cooler
that resulted in the card barely ever getting warm like seriously Under full
synthetic load we're looking at around the low 60 degrees at worst and in games
it sits around in the 50s the fans never even began to approach 50 percent let
alone higher even the internal case temperature was the lowest of any GPU in
our test Suite with a delta T over ambient of between just 10 and 11
degrees unlike the RTX 4090 this GPU
would be well suited to a small form factor chassis I'm wondering if NVIDIA
made this adjustment to ggp latent development and nobody got the memo in
time the question now is why though
NVIDIA didn't volunteer that information when we asked when we overclocked the
cards we noted that there wasn't a lot of Headroom for the GPU core clocks our
cards could only push between 110 and 150 megahertz over stock and while this
is obviously going to vary from card to card that's only about one percent which
is much lower than the roughly 15 percent you might find back on the 10
series cards this might be one reason why NVIDIA dialed back the GPU power a
bit in fact even when we pushed the memory and the core clock as high as
they would go we still didn't get substantially higher frame rates however
we did substantially increase power consumption letting further Credence the
idea that NVIDIA saw no reason to push the GPU to its rated 320 Watts under the
normal operation what we've observed is its sweet spot with that in mind what
are you getting for twelve hundred dollars U.S you're getting a GPU that's
much faster than anything the previous generation can muster with dual envy
encoders that support av-1 a thermally very tame design with boatloads of
thermal Headroom that could potentially be cut down to fit lower profile chassis
and official support for deep learning frame generation to boost perceived
frame rates where it needs to however unlike the RTX 4090 which is a Halo
product with no price pair currently the RTX 4080 has to compete with those last
gen cards and while the RTX 3090 TI is
close in its current retail price it's not as close in performance or power
consumption you're paying an extra hundred dollars for the 4080 and getting
in my opinion more than a hundred dollars in value the RX 6950 XT and RTX
3080 however those do represent a threat
in terms of value if the extra features simply don't matter to you some of these
can be purchased for as little as 800 brand new with used cards routinely
going for Less sometimes even 600 at half the price they definitely do not
represent just half the value based on our testing bear in mind the AMD card
draws substantially more power so if that's a concern go with the 3080 for
now we'll have all of those linked below none of which is to say that you
shouldn't buy the RTX 4080 it's a solid card and it's only just getting started
just maybe wait for reviews of AMD's
rdna 3 gpus to drop before pulling the trigger who knows you'll probably even
go on sale if AMD does a good enough job competition is beautiful
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watching guys go check out our response to AMD's upcoming rdna 3 graphics card
cards for more on how the GPU landscape is changing NVIDIA launched first but
they might not keep the lead