The RTX 3080 has impressive specs, but does it offer big gains over last year’s 2080 Super? In this RTX 3080 vs. 2080 Super matchup, we’re going to find out.
Nvidia offered a small but notable late-generation refresh to its Turing cards in the form of the RTX 2080 Super in 2019. It offered a slight performance boost over the standard 2080 at the same price as its predecessor. Now, however, it’s hard to find a 2080 Super at all, much less one at a reasonable price. The next generation of Nvidia GPUs is almost here, though, with the RTX 3080 set to replace the 2080 and 2080 Super. The 3080 is a more powerful card on paper, and it’s the same price as the 2080 Super. But is an upgrade worth it? In this Nvidia RTX 3080 versus 2080 Super comparison, we’re going to find out. The RTX 2080 Super launched in 2019 with an MSRP of $699, though you won’t find any Founders Edition cards at that price anymore. With the advent of the RTX-3000 series, paying anything more than that, or even slightly less, is not worth it. The RTX 3080 releases on September 17 for the same price as the 2080, $699. Board partner cards will likely be a little more expensive once they release. If Nvidia’s past launches have taught us anything, it’s that you probably won’t find a 3080 in stock right away. Prices for secondhand 2080 Supers will drop almost immediately, though. Based on specifications alone, the 3080 looks to be massively more capable than the 2080. It should be, but not quite in the way it seems on paper. The CUDA core count of the RTX 3080 is almost three times that of the 2080 Super. This is partly a standard increase in core count, but also because of a change in the way Nvidia designates what is, and is not, a CUDA core. The RTX 2080 Super has 3,072 floating-point (FP32) CUDA cores, and a further 3,072 integer (INT32) cores. They are both used in gaming, but FP32 more so. The RTX 3080 has 4,352 FP32 CUDA cores, and 4,352 cores that can do INT32 and FP32. That means that in FP32-heavy games, the 3080 could use all those extra cores to increase its FP32 performance, but in games that demand a lot of integer math, the core count increase is closer to 40%.
