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

The time has come. Two years on from the launch of Turing and the RTX 20-series GPUs, Nvidia's Ampere architecture is here and so is the RTX 30-series. Promising the ‘greatest generational leap' in terms of performance, Nvidia claims the new RTX 3080 is up to twice as fast the RTX 2080, thanks to its 28 billion transistors, 8704 CUDA Cores and 10GB of new GDDR6X memory. Just how fast is this GPU – really? 

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

It is safe to say the RTX 20-series never really captivated the gaming audience as Nvidia intended. Despite the Turing architecture bringing support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and the AI-driven Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, the relatively meagre gains in terms of traditional raster performance – coupled with increased pricing compared to the 10-series – meant many gamers held onto their Pascal GPUs (or older) instead of upgrading.

With Ampere, Nvidia is addressing the problem head-on. Core counts have been massively increased across the board, with the RTX 3090 boasting an astonishing 10496 CUDA cores, while the RTX 3080 comes in with 8704. Memory has also been upgraded in the form of Micron's new GDDR6X which, coupled with a wider 320-bit memory interface, delivers almost 70% higher memory bandwidth than the RTX 2080. Thanks to a move to Samsung's 8nm node, the RTX 3080 GPU also features an eye-watering 28 billion transistors.

The company is also pushing on with its RTX features, claiming significantly improved RT and Tensor core performance compared to Turing. It's safe to say the reception to RTX technology as a whole was pretty chilly, but with DLSS 2.0 launching in April, and Nvidia's 2nd Gen RT cores supposedly bringing twice the throughput of the first-gen cores, Ampere could be the coming out party for RTX.

All of these improvements come with increased power draw, despite Nvidia moving from TSMC's 12nm process to Samsung's 8nm process node with the 30-series. Total graphics power, or TGP – the power consumption of the entire card – is now up to 320W for the RTX 3080, a 28% increase over last generation's flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. Despite that, we can also note clock speeds have been slightly reduced compared to the 20-series, with the RTX 3080 sporting a boost clock of 1710MHz, down from the 1815MHz clock of the RTX 2080 Super.

Become a Patron!