Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. The Ampere Architecture3. RTX 3080 Founders Edition4. Testing Methodology5. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy6. 3DMark Port Royal7. Control8. Death Stranding9. The Division 210. Far Cry New Dawn11. Gears 512. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint13. Metro Exodus14. Middle Earth: Shadow of War15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Shadow of the Tomb Raider17. Total War Saga: Troy18. Performance Summary (11 Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. RTX On - Control21. RTX On - Metro Exodus22. RTX On - Shadow of the Tomb Raider23. DLSS On - Control & Death Stranding24. A Word on VRAM Usage25. Clock Speed26. Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Power Consumption29. Performance Per Watt Analysis30. Overclocking: Memory Scaling31. Closing Thoughts32. View All Pages

We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

It's no shock to see the RTX 3080 sitting top of the chart here, with total system power draw about 70W higher than the RTX 2080 Ti, or 110W higher than with the RTX 2080. This is expected considering the GPU's TGP is rated at 320W, the highest for any single-GPU that I can remember.

While total system power draw isn't an ideal metric for comparisons, we're seeing roughly 33% higher power draw than the RTX 2080. Directly comparing the rated TGPs of each card, the 3080's is 42% higher, while delivering on average 68% increased performance at 4K – certainly suggesting some efficiency improvement relative to that GPU.

On the other hand, the 3080 is 31% faster than the 2080 Ti at 4K, while it's rated TGP is 28% higher, so that is much more ambiguous when it comes to efficiency improvements.

Ultimately, I'm not sure many people will be too bothered about the increased power. It's certainly not the same situation as something like the GTX 1080, which delivered increased performance at significantly less power than the GTX 980 Ti, but most gamers will simply be glad to be seeing big gen-on-gen performance improvements again, even if power draw has gone up.

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