the rtx 3080 is the most powerful GPU
we've ever seen at this price point but
we've said that before and in fact we say it every time there's a new graphics
card generation so what makes this one so darn special i mean the hype
surrounding it was so huge that even we got caught up in it i mean look how
excited this guy is it's infectious but
as we all know hype disappoints and absolute hype
disappoints absolutely
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you hear that it's rattling weird um while you read over our test
platform let me get this off of my chest NVIDIA man you guys really went out of
your way to set yourselves up here didn't you like i don't
get it spoiler alert you're shipping the fastest graphics card on the market at
half the price of the previous king why don't you just leave it there why
push your luck with claims like twice as fast as rtx 2080 because it's not
now to be very clear it's not like i'm
saying you know burns 3080 biggest
disappointment ever because right out of the gate at 1440p
we're looking at a performance lead over not just the price comparable last gen
2080 but even the 2080 ti
and even with rtx disabled i mean this
is a freaking awesome leap in raw
horsepower overall we saw anywhere from a 20 to 75
uplift over the 2080 with the biggest benefits coming in directx 12 and vulcan
titles so then the only reason i'm disappointed at all
is because NVIDIA told me to expect double the performance of the 2080 which
as it turned out was anywhere from a small embellishment to a fish this big
whopper but wait okay because perhaps there's more to this
could our lackluster cs go performance numbers hold the key
look how CPU-bound this game ends up even at 1440p so let's kick it up a
notch to 4k where we're gonna leave out our rx 5700 xt so we can test out dlss
NVIDIA's deep learning up sampling technology and ooh is that
41 frames per second in microsoft flight simulator at 4k ultra no less holy sh
i mean not only that but the minimum of 34 FPS
that is perfectly playable in a game that's more focused on visuals versus
fast movement which means that we can definitively say yes it can run flight
sim 2020 like damn now in general we're still not seeing
that 2x performance bump with results closer to 75
but we're also still outpacing our rtx
2080 ti by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent and at 4k cs go really lets the
3080 flex its big gains in memory bandwidth thanks to its 10 gigs of
gddr6x memory that is a very small drop
in performance compared to 1440p so alright then while it may not be exactly
what NVIDIA promised us the 3080 is still a gaming monster
maybe productivity will give us a clearer understanding of what they meant
by that whole double the performance thing
and yeah okay that's double
and well ahead of the rtx 2080 ti in fact in
blender the rtx 3080's cuda score is so
good that it rivals excuse me scratch that beats the rtx
2080s rtx optimized optics render time
like excuse me pardon and don't even get me
started on the 3080s optics times i mean this
this is game-changing for students and prosumers and even professionals looking
to build affordable and powerful 3d rendering stations spec view perf does
bring us back down to earth somewhat with performance that's more in line
with our gaming numbers which is a bummer but at least it gives us a hint
as to where NVIDIA may have been focusing when they came up with that
double figure interestingly though team red pulled off
a couple of wins here too so while the 3080 tops the charts in most cases it's
not all powerful and AMD's big navi announcement next month could extend
some of those leads now part of the rationale for choosing a
ryzen-based GPU test bench was so that we could test pci express gen 3 versus
gen 4 starting with our review of the rx 5700 xt
unfortunately we had some issues to exercise so that'll have to
wait for another day get subscribed so you don't miss our deeper dive on pci
express gen 4. for now let's look at power draw
using NVIDIA's pcat tool we captured this data while running spec view perf
on our NVIDIA cards here and we can see that the rtx 3080 is sitting roughly 100
watts higher than the rtx 2080 ti impressively hitting a lofty maximum
above 350 watts
that is a lot of juice ladies and gentlemen and if the trend continues it
definitely explains why NVIDIA felt they needed this new 12-pin connector this
power draw translates into a significant increase in heat output as you might
expect as well but it turns out the new founders edition
cooler design is nothing short of incredible
in spite of it drawing a hundred watts more our 3080 maintained lower
temperatures in a closed chassis than our 2080 ti
and boosted to roughly two gigahertz under full load throughout our testing i
mean hey it's unconventional you know blowing
air up here and sucking air up through there but gosh darn it it works at least
for the GPU itself one small detail NVIDIA glossed over in
their marketing is that all of this heat has to go somewhere and when we dug a
little deeper well by jove we found it
as it turns out dumping heat directly into your CPU and RAM makes them run
hotter we even made this little graph where you can see system thermals
climbing by 10 degrees in a gentle arc across the board indicating that it's
not just spec view perf putting a load on these components or we'd be seeing a
spiky graph similar to our CPU and GPU temperatures
there is good news though when we ran the same test with a founder's edition
rtx 2080 ti we actually got even worse
results indicating that the more efficient
system airflow that NVIDIA boasted about for their cooler actually manages to
extend to the rest of the system as well so
good job guys and there's more to the story here than
performance and power alone NVIDIA has become
laser focused on system latency as a way to market their products even going as
far as to seed press with the internal tools that they use to measure it and as
it turns out that's for good reason now more frames per second does result in
smoother animations but since most
gamers would probably say 100 FPS looks
butter smooth it's clear that this smooth animations benefit has already
hit a wall of diminishing returns what doesn't seem to have a limit yet
however is the effect of higher frame rates on a gamer's actual performance
last year we demonstrated a benefit in competitive play all the way up to 240
hertz in this video featuring shroud mr grimms corey and paul's hardware so then
if the reason for this improvement in gaming acumen isn't
smoother animations well what is it it's the responsiveness of the system
the more often the image updates on screen the less delay a gamer is going
to feel between the movement of their mouse and the corresponding crosshair
making it easier to track down opponents well NVIDIA reflex which is launching
today as well takes this research NVIDIA's done and goes a step further
than even the ultra low latency mode that's been enabled in both NVIDIA and
AMD's drivers since last year and NVIDIA has worked with developers to improve
rendering latency directly in the game itself with a CPU-bound scenario it's
not exactly a big deal you're getting a very slight improvement in response time
with a bit more consistency we're not sure what that plus boost option is all
about but in fortnite anyway it doesn't seem to do much at least at high frame
rates other games implementations may be better NVIDIA says that reflex works
best in GPU bound loads anyway though and in that scenario latency goes from
90 to 120 milliseconds to around 45 to
80 with reflex enabled that's huge one
of the biggest problems with a low frame rate is low responsiveness so the small
sacrifice of one to two FPS ends up being a really good trade the best part
is that this feature works all the way back to 900 series maxwell gpus
great stuff also revolutionary is rtxio
which uses the same direct storage technology that microsoft is integrating
into the xbox series x and series x to
allow the GPU to stream and decompress data directly from an NVMe SSD using the
cuda cores from an rtx 2000 series card or newer now we can't test this feature
yet because there are no games on the market that support it yet but we would
expect gamers to see similar benefits to what sony showed off with their
analogous technology with improvements to everything from texture resolution in
game to even level design eliminating things like unnecessary elevator rides
while the assets load in but wait there's more
what we also can't test is the reports that all ampere-based cards support
sriov at a hardware level for the uninitiated sriov allows a single GPU to
be shared between multiple virtual machines never mind two gamers one GPU
with performance like this you could run a whole freaking lan center off a single
threadripper 3990x and like four of these i mean this would be a
monumental shift from NVIDIA considering that they've locked down g-force and
virtual machines since basically forever or at least it would
be NVIDIA clarified with us that the reports of their change of heart were
sadly overstated and as it turns out just because they can support the
feature doesn't mean that it's enabled and sure enough when we fired up our
3080 and Linux it didn't report any sri
ov capabilities NVIDIA does say though that the final decision on whether to
enable it or not has yet to be made so it is still possible they'll enable it
maybe if enough people tweeted them jensen will get the hint wink wink not
just please in summary then just like last time we have no way of
testing some of the headline features and no time to test others like NVIDIA
broadcast which we'll be sure to do a follow-up video on but unlike last time
the raw performance and pricing are compelling enough story on their own
even if NVIDIA overplayed their hand a little
and unlike last time the big feature you
know the one that's right in the name the hardware support for real-time ray
tracing has had a couple of years to mature with a much longer list of
supported games to go along with graphics cards that are now actually
powerful enough to turn the feature on without tanking the frame rate to be
clear it's still not the kind of thing that i would personally buy a new card
over but as far as added bonuses go
raytraced minecraft is pretty sweet
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so thanks for watching guys if you're looking for more ampere go check out our
post announcement explainer on ampere for a little bit more background info
and a little more context for all the hype
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