NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
16 November, 2022Type
Graphics CardPrice
$1199.99 USConclusion
The road to Ada was sure an exciting one. We got to see various rumors, leaks, and speculation & now we finally have the final product in our hands. There was sure a lot of hype surrounding the RTX 40 series cards and we will see whether the flagship card lives up to the expectations or not.
What Does Ada Bring To The Table?
The three major things that Ada is bringing to the table is a revamped architecture on all three fronts. The CUDA architecture has been given an update, the ray tracing cores have been given an update and the tensor cores have been given an update too. Not only are these three key areas upgraded to a new core design but they also introduce brand-new features. The new ray-tracing cores come with optimized ways to handle BVH processing and this can be seen in both games & applications that use ray-traced render paths. The new tensor cores not only boost existing DLSS performance but with DLSS 3 and frame-generation algorithms, we get to see a quantum leap in performance versus native resolution. And finally, we have raster performance where we got to see a jump anywhere from 50-80% (depending on the title). The average mostly settles around 60% but that itself is a big jump.
Ada is simply a quantum leap in all regards and its only gonna get better from here!
So here's the thing. If you were running an RTX 3090 series graphics card, you will immediately get a 50-80% performance boost without any DLSS or RT applied. With RT applied, the card sees less of a hit in performance versus the Ampere cores. The Ada cores just love RT and in ray tracing-heavy titles, you will notice that the performance gets closer to the 2x claim more often than rasterization. But with that said, ray tracing is still one of the most costly effects to enable in games and taxes the GPU a lot. That's where DLSS 3 comes in. While Ada can definitely handle most ray tracing games at 4K 60 FPS natively, you can get a further boost by leveraging DLSS 3 and that boost takes the perf to the next level. We got to see anywhere from 3-4x gains and in a few cases, our gains were above 4x, which is simply impressive.
Where the GeForce RTX 4090 & RTX 4080 truly shine is in the world of creative professionals who know they can put that massive VRAM pool to use for more than just gaming. Working with 8K Raw Footage in Davinci Resolve was a breeze on the RTX 4080 as well as the RTX 3090, but the RTX 4080 was able to present that experience for savings of a smooth grand. VRAY performance on the new Ada architecture is through the roof. The same goes for OctaneRender so long as you have the VRAM to support it otherwise, you'll find yourself stumbling. Blender really benefits from the architectural improvements and shows quite the speedup over the RTX 3080 when the other cards just don't have the VRAM to keep up.
"But I heard it consumes 900W & requires a new PSU"
Ok, so let's get a few things straight as the power consumption and temperatures discussion going around the Ada Lovelace GPUs has been baseless. So I would like to make sure this is as loud & clear as possible!
No It Doesn't Consumes Anywhere Close To 500W In Gaming And If Are Already Running A PSU That Is Rated At 750W Or Above, You Are Good To Upgrade!
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition has a TBP of 320W. The only applications that made it push that many watts were either synthetic benchmarks of power bugs such as Furmark or similar stress tests. I was playing Forza Horizon 5 at 4K with everything maxed out and got over 100 FPS while the GPU consumed 220WW of power. The graphics card offered a +20-30% higher performance than the RTX 3090 Ti which consumed around 400W of power in the same game. That's not all; the graphics card also never broke past the 60C in this particular test, while the RTX 3090 Ti was running around 68C.
The GeForce RTX 4080 is a very efficient card. No game was able to push the card past 300 Watts no matter how much hard I tried. With every setting cranked up to the max including ray tracing & running the game natively, the card just stood within a 300W power budget while delivering better performance than an RTX 3090 Ti. That's a major leap in efficiency. We even managed to undervolt our card to a fixed 225W and the card still offered 90% of its overall performance which means it offers 20% better performance than an RTX 3090 Ti at half the power budget.
NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 runs cool, draws much less power than the previous gen and offers up to 40% better performance natively versus the previous-gen flagship. It is one hell of a card!
And to answer the question of whether you really need one of those fancy ATX 3.0 PSUs? Well, you really don't. As I said, if you have a good 850W+ PSU, that's more than enough but if you are planning to build an entirely new PSU, then investing in the latest ATX 3.0 standard will be a good choice but not a required one.
I would suggest that anyone who plans on getting an RTX 4080 makes sure they have a fast CPU. The RTX 4080 demand a lot of processing power to be coupled with and even the Core i9-12900K can become a bit of a bottleneck in some cases. Overclocking the 12900K is the way to go & it's even better if you plan on getting a Ryzen 7000 or Intel 13th Gen PC.
Is It Worth The Price?
The RTX 3080 was priced at $699 US and the RTX 4080 costs $1199 US. That's a $500 US increase or a 71.5% increase. Even compared to the 3080 12 GB, this is a 35% increase and we aren't even taking the custom models into the equation yet which are priced at a $100-$200 US premium. This is a hard pill to swallow and to be honest, this card should've been called the 4080 Ti but that title is reserved for a future graphics card.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is a great graphics card which is hurt by its own pricing.
Compared to the RTX 3090 Ti which can be found for around $1000 US (New), paying $200 US more for 20-40% better performance, more features and reduced power consumption sounds like a very good deal. It's an all-around package that comes with the latest RT and DLSS enhancement and the support of NVIDIA's extensive GeForce feature suite which is one big reason alone that one would like to stick with the brand regardless of the value or performance offered by the competition.
With that said, there's a compelling graphics card lineup on the horizon by competitor AMD. The new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards are already been revealed with prices $200-$300 US less than the RTX 4080 and what seems to be higher memory and possibly even performance. We have to wait to confirm the latter but it is one reason why we would recommend you wait a few more weeks before grabbing the RTX 4080 cards.
NVIDIA GeForce GPU Segment/Tier Prices
| Graphics Segment | 2023-2024 | 2022-2023 | 2021-2022 | 2020-2021 | 2019-2020 | 2018-2019 | 2017-2018 | 2016-2017 | 2014-2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Titan Tier | GeForce RTX 4090 | GeForce RTX 4090 | GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GeForce RTX 3090 | GeForce RTX 3090 | Titan RTX (Turing) | Titan V (Volta) | Titan Xp (Pascal) | Titan X (Pascal) | Titan X (Maxwell) |
| Price | $1599 US | $1599 US | $1999 US $1499 US | $1499 US | $2499 US | $2999 US | $1199 US | $1199 US | $999 US |
| Ultra Enthusiast Tier | GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER | GeForce RTX 4080 | GeForce RTX 3080 Ti | GeForce RTX 3080 Ti | GeForce RTX 2080 Ti | GeForce RTX 2080 Ti | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti | GeForce GTX 980 Ti | GeForce GTX 980 Ti |
| Price | $999 US | $1199 US | $1199 US | $1199 US | $999 US | $999 US | $699 US | $649 US | $649 US |
| Enthusiast Tier | GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER | GeForce RTX 4070 Ti | GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB | GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB | GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER | GeForce RTX 2080 | GeForce GTX 1080 | GeForce GTX 1080 | GeForce GTX 980 |
| Price | $799 US | $799 US | $799 US | $699 US | $699 US | $699 US | $549 US | $549 US | $549 US |
| High-End Tier | GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER GeForce RTX 4070 | GeForce RTX 4070 GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 3070 | GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 3070 | GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | GeForce RTX 2070 | GeForce GTX 1070 | GeForce GTX 1070 | GeForce GTX 970 |
| Price | $599 $549 | $599 US $499 US | $599 $499 | $599 $499 | $499 US | $499 US | $379 US | $379 US | $329 US |
| Mainstream Tier | GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GeForce RTX 4060 | GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GeForce RTX 4060 | GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB | GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB | GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER GeForce RTX 2060 GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER GeForce GTX 1660 | GeForce GTX 1060 | GeForce GTX 1060 | GeForce GTX 1060 | GeForce GTX 960 |
| Price | $449 $299 | $399 US $299 US | $399 US $329 US | $399 US $329 US | $399 US $349 US $279 US $229 US $219 US | $249 US | $249 US | $249 US | $199 US |
| Entry Tier | RTX 3050 8 GB RTX 3050 6 GB | RTX 3050 | RTX 3050 | GTX 1650 SUPER GTX 1650 | GTX 1650 SUPER GTX 1650 | GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050 | GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050 | GTX 950 | GTX 750 Ti GTX 750 |
| Price | $229 $179 | $249 US | $249 US | $159 US $149 US | $159 US $149 US | $139 US $109 US | $139 US $109 US | $149 US | $149 US $119 US |
Conclusion
NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards deliver an absolutely massive upgrade over the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti while taking GPU efficiency to new heights. Coupled with features such as superior ray tracing performance and DLSS 3, the graphics card could've been a definitive upgrade over its predecessor but unfortunately, with everything so great about this card, it is plagued by one of the worst price bumps we have seen to date. All we can hope is that NVIDIA revises its price strategy with the upcoming mainstream cards.
Contents
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About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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