According to a Tweet posted by leaker @kopite7kimi earlier this morning, the "estimated" performance of Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 GPUs in 3DMark’s TimeSpy Extreme benchmark looks incredibly promising. Projections say the RTX 4080 will be faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, and the RTX 4070 will be just as fast as the RTX 3080 10GB — one of the Best Graphics Cards on the market.
RTX 4080, TSE >15000, RTX 4070, TSE ~10000. These scores are based on specs I mentioned before. Honestly, it's not quite sure yet except RTX 4090. Well, I don't care.July 29, 2022
As usual, take these results with a grain of salt. In fact, Kopite says they aren’t fully confident in the data points shared, but the leaker has a stellar record for accuracy. We've been making similar estimates for a while now, based on rumored specs, but it's not clear if Kopite actually saw some real performance data and merely obfuscated it to protect the (not so) innocent, or if these are purely guesses.
For reference, Kopite already shared RTX 4090 Time Spy Extreme data a week ago, which indicates GPU performance to be around 30% quicker than the fastest performing RTX 3090 Ti’s — overclocked and with liquid cooling. With that data as a starting point, Kopite’s RTX 4080 and 4070 figures aren’t all that shocking.
Kopite believes the RTX 4080 will hit a very impressive Time Spy Extreme graphics score of 15,000 points, a touch faster than the RTX 3090 Ti at normal frequencies. In Time Spy Extreme specifically, this data would make the RTX 4080 40% to 50% faster than its predecessor, the RTX 3080 10GB, which would be a massive generational improvement. If GPU prices for the 4080 are remotely similar to the 3080, customers will be getting a very powerful graphics card for the money.
The RTX 4070 estimates aren’t as impressive, but it is still a healthy gen-on-gen improvement nonetheless (if true). Kopite believes the RTX 4070 will hit 10,000 points in Time Spy Extreme, which coincides perfectly with most of the RTX 3080 10GB results in 3DMark’s results browser. Compared to the 3070, this translates into a 25% performance improvement and performance equal to that of the RTX 3080.
We've long suspected that Nvidia's RTX 40-series architecture will be a monster — for the RTX 4090 and 4080 in particular, it will almost certainly bring record-shattering generational performance improvements. Still, it will come at the cost of power consumption. The biggest unknown now is GPU pricing, which could swing in any direction depending on shortage issues and the 40-series release date. Performance only goes so far, unless you can get it at a good value.
For a deeper dive into all that we know about the RTX 40-series 'Ada' architecture, check our existing article. Also note that 3DMark only represents one synthetic graphics benchmark, and what we really want to see are real-world gaming benchmarks. All indications are that we should have hardware in hand by October, possibly sooner.