Nvidia RTX 3080: PCIe 4.0 vs 3.0 scaling analysis

1. Introduction2. Testing Methodology3. 3DMark Synthetic4. Control5. Death Stranding6. The Division 27. Far Cry New Dawn8. Gears 59. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint10. Horizon Zero Dawn11. Metro Exodus12. Middle Earth: Shadow of War13. Red Dead Redemption 214. Shadow of the Tomb Raider15. Total War Saga: Troy16. RTX On - Control17. RTX On - Metro Exodus18. RTX On - Shadow of the Tomb Raider19. Performance Summary (15 Game Average)20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

By the time you are reading this, RTX 3080 reviews will be live and we will know exactly how fast this new Ampere GPU really is. But what about PCIe 4.0 – does it make a difference? Were we wrong to use Intel's Comet Lake-S platform for our RTX 3080 review data? Let's answer that question by directly comparing RTX 3080 performance on AMD's X570 platform with PCIe 4.0, versus Intel Z490 and PCIe 3.0.

If you haven't already read our full RTX 3080 review, I would recommend doing so first. That will give you an idea of how this new GPU compares to the likes of the RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1080 Ti and more. In this article, we are only looking at performance of the RTX 3080, but tested on different CPU platforms.

Here, we are comparing three sets of data. First of all, the data we used for our review – the RTX 3080 Founders Edition tested with an Intel i9-10900K overclocked to 5.1GHz, restricting us to PCIe 3.0 due to the Z490 platform. To give us an idea of PCIe Gen4 performance with this GPU, we turn to AMD's Ryzen 9 3900XT and the X570 platform. As a final data set, we also force PCIe 3.0 while testing with the Ryzen 9 3900XT.

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 2080 Ti (FE)	RTX 2080 SUPER	RTX 2080 (FE)
SMs	82	68	68	48	46
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	4352	3072	2944
Tensor Cores	328	272	544	384	368
RT Cores	82	68	68	48	46
Texture Units	328	272	272	192	184
ROPs	112	96	88	64	64
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1635 MHz	1815 MHz	1800 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	15.5 Gbps	14 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	11GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	352-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	616 GB/sec	496.1 GB/sec	448 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	260W	250W	225W

Become a Patron!