Nvidia has posted its first official performance numbers for its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and GeForce RTX 4080 16GB graphics cards. The version with 16GB of memory appears to be 21% – 30% faster than its 12GB counterpart. Meanwhile, Nvidia's previous generation flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is still faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB — at least without any DLSS enabled.
Nvidia compared its latest GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards (including the flagship GeForce RTX 4090) against each other and against its previous-generation GeForce RTX 30-series products in Microsoft Flight Simulator, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and F1 22.
The comparison focused primarily on performance advantages provided by the company's latest DLSS 3 technology (with optical multi frame generation, resolution upscaling, and Nvidia Reflex), but the Nvidia also included performance numbers without any enhancements. Furthermore, it included its first official GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and GeForce RTX 4080 16GB performance comparison.
Traditionally, Microsoft's Flight Simulator games are tough on both CPUs and GPUs and the latest version is no exception. Both DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 bring significant performance uplift to the game, but so does Nvidia's new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture (perhaps courtesy of enhanced ray tracing performance).
With DLSS 3 on, the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB is 21% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB; without DLSS 3 the 16GB version is 26% faster than the 12GB. The GeForce RTX 4080 12GB offers the same performance as the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB without DLSS 3 — not bad at all, and this is still one of the best gaming graphics cards today.
For some reason Nvidia decided to test A Plague Tale: Requiem without enabling ray tracing, but with DLSS technologies enabled. DLSS 3 brings even more tangible performance enhancements than DLSS 2, so all GeForce RTX 40-series boards are substantially faster than their predecessors.
In this test, the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB is 21% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB with DLSS 3 enabled, and is 30% faster with DLSS 3 disabled. Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is 19% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB without DLSS enabled. Also, the new GeForce RTX 4080 12GB is only 4 frames per second (fps), or about 12%, faster than the original GeForce RTX 3080 in this test.
In F1 22 you want to get all the framerates you can possibly have, so both DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 are helpful. The new version is somewhat more efficient with its optical multi frame generation, and Ada Lovelace boards are clearly faster than Ampere boards in this title.
With DLSS 3 enabled, the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB is 27% faster than its 12GB sibling, and is 24% faster without DLSS 3 enabled. Also, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti turns out to be 7% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB without DLSS enabled. Still, the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB is consistently faster than the original GeForce RTX 3080.
While Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and GeForce RTX 4080 16GB carry the same model number, they are based on completely different graphics processors (AD104 vs. AD103) and feature different CUDA core counts (7680 vs. 9728). When combined with distinctive memory bandwidth (504 GB/s vs. 717 GB/s), the two models offer very different performance levels than you would typically expect from graphics boards carrying the same model number.
For an easier comparison, we've combined the relative performance differences between Nvidia's latest desktop GPUs into a table.
Performance of GeForce RTX 40 and GeForce 30-Series Graphics Cards (without DLSS)
Row 0 - Cell 0 | GeForce RTX 4080 12GB | GeForce RTX 4080 16GB | GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB | GeForce RTX 4090 24GB |
MS Flight Simulator | 100% | 126% | 101% | 142% |
A Plague Tale: Requiem | 100% | 130% | 119% | 251% |
F1 22 | 100% | 124% | 107% | 172% |