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

Here we present frame rate figures for each graphics card, averaged across all 12 games on test today. These figures can disguise significant variations in performance from game to game, but provide a useful overview of the sort of performance you can expect at each resolution tested.

In terms of the average performance, at 1440p we can see the RTX 4080 delivered 171FPS. This makes it 16% slower than the RTX 4090, 19% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti and 25% ahead of the RX 6950 XT.

At 4K, the trends do change slightly. First of all, the RTX 4090 gets to stretch its legs, and the RTX 4080 is 24% slower on average than the Ada flagship. We can also see that the RTX 3090 Ti catches up, relatively speaking, with the 4080 coming in 17% faster on average, when it was 19% faster at 4K.

This was something we observed on several occasions throughout out game testing, and could be down to a few factors. Memory bandwidth is probably the main one, as even with fast GDDR6X memory, the 256-bit interface reduces bandwidth significantly compared to the likes of the 3090 and 3090 Ti. Those GPUs also have more cores, so while they may be slower than Ada cores on a one-to-one basis, at 4K the extra FP32 processing power could be leveraged. And lastly, in our discussions with Nvidia about this, they also mentioned driver maturity and the fact Ampere has been on the market for two years.

It will be interesting to see if the picture changes as we go forward into 2023 and beyond.

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