Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. Meet the RTX 4080 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Cyberpunk 20778. Days Gone9. Dying Light 210. Far Cry 611. Forza Horizon 512. God of War13. Horizon Zero Dawn14. Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Resident Evil Village17. Total War: Warhammer III18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered22. Ray Tracing: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition23. Ray Tracing: Resident Evil: Village24. Clock Speed25. GPU Temperatures26. Acoustics27. Noise-Normalised Temperatures28. Power Draw: 1080p29. Power Draw: 1440p30. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)31. Performance per Watt: 1080p32. Performance per Watt: 1440p33. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)34. Total System Power Draw35. Overclocking36. Closing Thoughts37. View All Pages

Today's launch would have marked the release of the first of two RTX 4080 SKUs… but as we know, the RTX 4080 12GB was summarily ‘unlaunched' just weeks after its initial announcement. The RTX 4080 16GB now stands alone as the sole xx80 SKU for the 40-series, priced at £1269 here in the UK. The sheer cost has risen many an eyebrow, but can this graphics card bring enough to the table to justify its position in the market? We put it through its paces today and find out.

Announced alongside the RTX 4090 at GTC in September, the Nvidia RTX 4080 marks a change in strategy for the xx80 SKU. Unlike the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, which were both built on the top-tier GA102 die, this time around the RTX 4080 does not share the same core silicon as the RTX 4090. We know RTX 4090 is built on AD102, but Nvidia has introduced a new die for the RTX 4080 – AD103.

This means there is a much larger separate between the xx80 and xx90 products than what we saw last generation. The RTX 3080 offered just 17% fewer cores than the RTX 3090, but the RTX 4080 is cut down by more than a third. As we shall see, that manifests itself as a signifiant performance differential between the two 40-series cards.

Still, we have plenty of benchmarks to go over before giving our final verdict. If you want to read this review as a single page, click HERE.

	RTX 4090	RTX 4080	RTX 3090 Ti	RTX 3090	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3080
Process	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N
SMs	128	76	84	82	80	68
CUDA Cores	16384	9728	10752	10496	10240	8704
Tensor Cores	512	304	336	328	320	272
RT Cores	128	76	84	82	80	68
Texture Units	512	304	336	328	320	272
ROPs	176	112	112	112	112	96
GPU Boost Clock	2520 MHz	2505 MHz	1860 MHz	1695 MHz	1665 MHz	1710 MHz
Memory Data Rate	21 Gbps	22.4 Gbps	21 Gbps	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	19 Gbps
L2 Cache	73729 KB	65536 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	5120 KB
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	16GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1008 GB/Sec	716.8 GB/Sec	1008 GB/Sec	936 GB/Sec	912 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec
TGP	450W	320W	450W	350W	350W	320W

First, for a quick spec recap. We already mentioned that RTX 4080 uses the AD103 die, and this is notably smaller than AD102, measuring 378.6mm². Accordingly, transistor count is reduced from 76.3 billion, down to 45.9 billion. The fundamental building blocks are still the same of course, with the RTX 4080 offering a total of 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), each housing 256 CUDA Cores, for a total of 9728. We also find 84 RT cores, 336 Tensor cores, 336 Texture Units, and 112 ROPs.

TSMC's N4 node has Nvidia cranking up the clock speed significantly this generation, with the RTX 4080 sporting a 2505MHz rated boost clock. That's nominally 15MHz slower than the RTX 4090, but we'd expect overall behaviour to be very similar.

The memory configuration is another area where AD103 has been cut-back significantly. The memory interface has been reduced to 256-bit, and even with 16GB GDDR6X running at 22.4Gbps, that cuts memory bandwidth down to 716.6GB/s. That said, there has been a substantial upgrade to the L2 cache with the Ada architecture, with the RTX 4080 now offering 65.5MB, compared to just 6MB for GA102.

Considering RTX 4080 is notably cut-down versus the RTX 4090, rated power draw is lower, with a 320W TGP. This is something we focus on closely, using our updated GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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