The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 promises to bring next-gen performance to the table, without raising the price over its Turing counterparts. But does it deliver? Read our review of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 to find out.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 follows the beloved Nvidia Turing by offering fantastic performance, while also keeping its price at the same point that the RTX 2080 Super launched at. Looking back, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti launched at inflated prices, which made them harder for everyday users to get their hands on. Nvidia doesn’t really drop prices this time around, but the fact that you can get much greater performance than the RTX 2080 Ti at nearly half the price means that 4K gaming is much more attainable with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. Lucky for us, Nvidia has taken notice of AMD’s more reasonable pricing and dropped the prices on its new slate of GPUs, even if it’s not by much. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 hit the streets, therefore, with not only a boost of 50-80% in performance over the RTX 2080 and 20-30% over the RTX 2080 Ti, a card that’s almost twice as expensive, but also better power efficiency and a much more affordable price. That means that you can now play the just-dropped Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K without dropping a couple of thousands of dollars. The launch of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, which directly competes with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 at a slightly cheaper price, might complicate things for the new Nvidia flagship. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, in its own right, is the biggest generational leap in PC graphics we’ve seen in years – perhaps ever. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is available on September 17, starting at $699 (£649, about AU$950) for the Founders Edition. However, as with any major graphics card launch, there will be dozens of aftermarket graphics cards from companies like MSI, Asus, Zotac and more. Just be aware that some of these aftermarket card designs may see steep price increases over this Founders Edition, based on things like exotic cooling solutions and factory-tuned overclocks. But every RTX 3080 should more or less be in the ballpark of performance as the one Nvidia itself launches. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is based on the new Nvidia Ampere graphics architecture, which brings huge improvements to both raw performance and power efficiency. The fact that Nvidia has increased the power budget so much over the RTX 2080 while boosting power efficiency means that the overall performance profile is far above what any Nvidia Turing graphics card was capable of. There have been obvious improvements to the RT and Tensor cores – we’re on the second and third generation, respectively – but perhaps the biggest improvement has been to the rasterization engine. Through some clever optimization, Nvidia was able to double the amount of CUDA cores present on each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) by making both data paths on each SM able to handle Floating Point 32 (FP32) workloads – a vast improvement over Turing, where one data path was dedicated entirely to integer workloads. This effectively doubles raw FP32 throughput core for core, though this won’t directly translate into double the frame-rate in your favorite PC games – at least, not for many of them. What this means is that, while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 only has 46% more SMs than the RTX 2080 at 68, it more than doubles the CUDA core count, from 2,944 to 8,704. This translates to nearly three times the theoretical FP32 throughput from around 10 TFLOPs to 29.7 TFLOPs – an absolutely massive generational leap. When you pair the uplift in CUDA cores, with massive boosts to Cache, Texture Units and Memory Bandwidth – thanks to the move to faster GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit bus – gaming performance gets one of the biggest generational jumps in years, even if it does fall a bit short of that ‘2x performance’ target that we’re sure some folks were hoping for. But more on that later. Nvidia RT cores are also back – that’s why Nvidia has the RTX name, after all – and they also see massive improvements. Nvidia Ampere graphics cards, including the RTX 3080, include second-generation RT cores, which will function similarly to the first generation RT cores, but will be twice as efficient. When ray tracing, the SM will cast a light ray in a scene that’s being rendered, and the RT core will take over from there, where it will do all the calculations necessary to find out where that light ray bounces, and will report that information back to the SM.
