COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Vulcan OC-V Review

TdfROur sample of the iGAME GeForce RTX 3080Ti Vulcan OC-V did not come in a retail box so we're not able to share what that looks like, but the card will be the same along with the included cables and GPU support bracket.

The iGAME GeForce RTX 3080Ti Vulcan OC-V is an absolute unit of a card requiring 3 full slots for installation and plenty of room between the motherboard and the side panel as the card is much much wider than a standard reference model. The front of the card features the 3 fan arrangement with a stationary hub that makes for a really cool effect when the fans are engaged, it leaves the hub just like you leave it set (and the hub is adjustable so you can have the logos facing any direction). The rear of the card features a very nice two-tone finish with clear branding and an RGB iGAME logo towards the rear of the card.

The side profile of the card shows its mass off really well. Triple slot cooler with a nice clean aesthetic, basically consisting of another GeForce RTX logo along with the full-color LCD screen on the side. You can see the inverted triple 8-pin connectors along the rear as well.

A big draw by many to this particular graphics card is certainly the LCD screen, and with many people mounting their graphics cards vertically COLORFUL has taken that into consideration and put the screen on a tilting mechanism allowing for up to 90 degrees of adjustment.

The I/O of the GPU even features COLORFUL's signature OC button which is really neat as one profile allows the card to run at the default reference speeds and the other allows for the graphics card's overclocked settings (which is what we used for this review).

Along with the graphics card, in the box, you'll find the necessary cables to connect the GPU to an open USB 2.0 header in order to control the screen with the iGAME Game Center Software. You'll also find a GPU support bracket and screwdriver to hold up this massive graphics card to keep it from sagging, no one wants to spend this kind of money and see their GPU look like it's about to snap their PCIe bracket off inside their build.

The graphics card LCD is actually a bit more useful than I expected it to be, by default it just shows the Vulcan logo in a smoothly animated fashion but when you install the software and the included cable you're able to display graphics card diagnostics from the clock speeds to temperatures but you will need the software to do that.

I'm not a big 3rd party software person but this implementation has much more care put in than the iGAME RTX 3080 Advanced OC got and that is great as you'll need to use this on your system to get the most of this extremely expensive graphics card. You can change the image as well as what information is displayed and how often. I was unfortunately not able to play DOOM on the display which was a bit of a bummer.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, unlike its predecessor, does a good job putting DX12 to use and results in higher performance than the DX11 counterpart in this title, and because of that, we test this title in DX12.  I do use the second segment of the benchmark run to gather these numbers as it is more indicative of in-game scenarios where the foliage is heavy.

DOOM Eternal

DOOM Eternal brings hell to earth with the Vulkan powered idTech 7.  We test this game using the Ultra Nightmare Preset and follow our in-game benchmarking to stay as consistent as possible.

Watchdogs Legions sees a return of the Disrupt Engine they've been using since the early days with the original Watchdogs but this time it has been updated to next-generation feature support. Dropping DX11 for DX12 we see much better utilization than in the past. Being one of the recent top sellers it earned a place in our test suite.

Call of Duty Modern Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is the latest installment of the Call of Duty Series. Returning with DX12 support just like the Modern Warfare remake we tested this game during the opening of the Fractured Jaw level with the highest settings selected.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the two major PS4 exclusives that rocked their way onto the PC scene with massive acceptance and sales. Horizon Zero Dawn is powered by the Decima Engine and has been ported to DX12. We used the in-game benchmark to account for performance.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 has made its way into the test lineup thanks to strong demand by gamers and simply delivering MORE Borderlands. This game is rather intensive after the Medium preset but since we're testing the 'Ultimate UW 1440p' card, High it is. We tested using the built-in benchmark utility

Total War Saga: Troy

Total War Saga: Troy is powered by their TW Engine 3 (Total War Engine 3) and in this iteration, they have stuck to a strictly DX11 release. We tested the game using the built-in benchmark using the Dynasty model that represents a battle with many soldiers interacting at once and is more representative of normal gameplay.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, unlike its predecessor, does a good job putting DX12 to use and results in higher performance than the DX11 counterpart in this title, and because of that, we test this title in DX12.  I do use the second segment of the benchmark run to gather these numbers as it is more indicative of in-game scenarios where the foliage is heavy. SotTR features Ray Traced Shadows and enabled in the benchmarks with the game set to the 'Highest' preset and RT Shadows at High. DLSS was used only when labeled.

Call of Duty Modern Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is the latest installment of the Call of Duty Series. Returning with DX12 support just like the Modern Warfare remake we tested this game during the opening of the Fractured Jaw level with the highest settings selected.

Control

Control is powered by Remedy's Northlight Storytelling Engine but severely pumped up to support multiple functions of ray-traced effects. We ran this through our test run in the cafeteria with all ray tracing functions on high and the game set to high. DLSS was enabled for this title in the quality setting when it was available.

Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil Village is the latest in the horror franchise that was wonderfully rekindled with RE7 and onto the RE2 Remake. But now the RE Engine is back and better than ever with Ray Traced Reflections and Lighting that makes the world just come to life, unironically. The game was tested in the center of the village itself with setting maxed out and Ray Tracing on High settings.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus was the third entry into the Metro series and as Artym ventures away from the Metro he, and you, are able to explore the world with impressive RT Global Illumination. RTGI has proven to be quite an intense feature to run. Metro Exodus also supports DLSS so it was used in our testing. Advanced PhysX was left disabled, but Hairworks was left on.

Watchdogs Legions sees a return of the Disrupt Engine they've been using since the early days with the original Watchdogs but this time it has been updated to next-generation feature support. Dropping DX11 for DX12 we see much better utilization than in the past. Being one of the recent top sellers it earned a place in our test suite.

DiRT 5

DiRT 5 is the latest in the series and it's an absolute joy to play but it is not kind on your hardware. AMD worked with Codemasters to get Ray Traced Shadows and VRS into the game. But as of the time of publishing only the Ray Traced shadows have made their way into the public build of the game

Graphics cards and power draw have always been quite synonymous with each other in terms of how much performance they put out for the power they take in. Measuring this has not always been the most straightforward when it comes to accuracy and methods for reviewers and end-users. NVIDIA has developed their PCAT system, or Power Capture Analysis Tool in order to be able to capture direct power consumption from ALL graphics cards that plug into the PCIe slot so that you can get a very clear barometer on actual power usage without relying on hacked together methods

The Old Way

The old method, for most anyway, was to simply use something along the lines of a Kill-A-Watt wall meter for power capture. This isn't the worst way, but as stated in our reviews it doesn't quite capture the amount of power that the graphics card alone is using. This results in some mental gymnastics figuring out how much the graphics card is using by figuring the system idle, CPU load, and the GPU load and estimating about where the graphics card lands, not very accurate, to say the least.

Another way is to use GPU-z. This is the least reliable method as you have to rely entirely on the software reading from the graphics card. This is a poor method as the graphics cards vary in how they report to software when it comes to power usage. Some will only send out what the GPU core itself is using and not consider what the memory is drawing or any other component.

The last way I'll mention is the use of a multi-meter amperage clamp across the PCIe slot by way of a riser cable with separate cables then more power clamps on all the PCIe power cables going into the graphics card. This method is very accurate for graphics card power but is also very cumbersome and typically results in you having to watch the numbers and document them as you see them rather than plotting them across a spreadsheet.

The PCAT Way

This is where PCAT (power capture analysis tool) comes into play. NVIDIA has developed quite a robust tool for measuring graphics card power at the hardware level and taking the guesswork out of the equation. The tool is quite simple to set up and get going, as far as components used there are; a riser board for the GPU with a 4-pin Dupont cable, the PCAT module itself that everything plugs into with an OLED screen attached, 3 PCI-e cables for when a card calls for more than 2x 8-pin connectors, and a Micro-USB cable that allows you to capture the data on the system you're hooked up to or a secondary monitoring system.

Well, that's what it looks like when all hooked up on a test bench, you're not going to want to run this one in a case for sure. Before anyone gets worried, performance is not affected at all by this and the riser board is fully compliant with PCIe Gen 4.0. I'm not so certain about those exposed power points however, I will be getting the hot glue gun out soon for that.  Now, what does this do at this point? Well, two options: Plug it into the computer that it's all running on and let FrameView include the metrics, but that's for NVIDIA cards only so a pass, OR (what we do) plug it into a separate monitoring computer and observe and capture during testing scenarios.

The PCAT Power Profile Analyzer is the software tool provided to use to capture and monitor power readings across the PCI Express Power profile. The breadth of this tool is exceptionally useful for us here on the site to really explore what we can monitor. The most useful metric on here to me is the ability to monitor power across all sources, PCIe power cables (individually), and the PCIe slot itself.

Those who rather pull long-form spreadsheets to make their own charts are fully able to do so and even able to quickly form performance per watt metrics. We've found a very fun metric to monitor is actually Watts per frame, how many watts does it take for the graphics card to produce one frame at a locked 60FPS in various games, we'll get into that next.

Control Power

Control was the first game that we wanted to take a look at running at 1440p with RT on, and then again with RT off.

These results for Control show that NVIDIAs measurements and claims of improvements were accurate, but it's not always the case. We tested Forza Horizon 4 in a spot to test the same way again but this time at 1440p and looking at when we target a 1440p60 scene in this game