Nvidia RTX 4080 16GB is up to 30% faster than the 12GB variant

Nvidia shared official performance figures for the two upcoming RTX 4080 GPUs. As expected, the 16GB model will be considerably faster than the 12GB variant. However, the 24-30% performance gap is more than their names suggest.

Based on Nvidia's official performance charts, the Nvidia RTX 4080 16GB is considerably faster than its 12GB sibling. Unfortunately, Nvidia only shared performance numbers for three games (Microsoft Flight Simulator, F1 22, and Plague Tale: Requiem). Still, it should be enough to get an idea before third-party reviewers can test them themselves.

The 16GB version of the GPU in Microsoft Flight Simulator is 26% faster than the 12GB. Enabling DLSS 3 in this comparison reduces the gap to 21%. Moving on to F1 22, the difference in performance is somewhat similar to what you see in Flight Simulator, with the 16GB model being 27% faster than the 12GB one with DLSS 3 and 24% if DLSS 3 is disabled.

Plague Tale: Requiem is the game where you can see the most significant difference in performance. With DLSS 3 enabled, the RTX 4080 16GB is 21% faster than the 12GB counterpart, which is actually the lowest gain over the 12GB variant. However, with DLSS 3 disabled, the 16GB model is a whopping 30% faster than the 12GB.

As a side note, the RTX 3090 Ti was also present in these charts. Due to the lack of DLSS 3 support, it was inferior to both RTX 4080 models. However, once the upscaling technique was out of the equation, the RTX 3090 Ti was always faster than the RTX 4080 12GB, even if by a small margin.

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Kitguru says: All in all, the performance difference between the two is what you could expect considering how far apart their MSRPs are. However, considering the performance gap between these two GPUs, it's weird to see them sharing the same name.

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