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A new graphics card that costs $1,000 — or more, if you get an overclocked model — should certainly be able to handle 4K gaming, right? Right? But that's only true if you're not planning to max out settings in every game, or if you're willing to use upscaling. Our 1440p results on the next page will largely echo what you can expect to get from 4K with Quality mode upscaling, but native 4K proves to be too much for even the 4080 Super.
It's not about a lack of VRAM, at least. There may be future games where 16GB isn't enough to properly handle 4K gaming, or games with mods that push VRAM use even higher, but everything in our test suite is perfectly happy with 16GB. The problem is that fully rendering 8.3 million pixels per frame simply requires a ton of compute, especially if you enable ray tracing.
As usual, we'll start with the overview of our standard 15-game test suite, then break things down into rasterization and ray tracing tests, and then we'll follow that with our three 'bonus' games — all of which launched on PC within the past year.
RTX 4080 Super 4K Overall Performance
If you were expecting more from the 4080 Super, you must have skipped the introduction and news preceding the launch. It only has 5% more compute and 3% more memory bandwidth, which means that, in general, you should expect less than a 5% increase in overall performance compared to the vanilla 4080. And that's exactly what we get.
Overall, the 4080 Super outpaces the vanilla 4080 by 3.5% in our 4K ultra testing. The range across the entire test suite is between 0.5% (Forza Horizon 5) and 5.5% (Far Cry 6), with the usual ~1% margin of error. Basically, short of detailed benchmarking, you're unlikely to notice any real-world difference between the RTX 4080 Super and the RTX 4080.
If the RTX 4090 were still selling at $1,599, it would be more of a competitor. It's still around 30% faster overall across our test suite, and that's because it has 58% more compute, 37% more memory bandwidth, and 50% more memory capacity. But right now, the cheapest card we can find costs $1,799, and we've routinely seen the base price above $2,000 in the past few months.
The matchup against AMD's RX 7900 XTX is what you'd expect. The vanilla 4080 was already basically tied in rasterization performance and much faster in ray tracing, with a 10% lead overall. Now, the 4080 Super turns that into a 14% lead, except now the Nvidia card has the same base MSRP (even though the 7900 XTX tends to start at around $950).
RTX 4080 Super 4K Rasterization Performance
Pure rasterization performance is as good as it will get for AMD at 4K ultra. The RX 7900 XTX just edges past the RTX 4080 Super overall, leading by 1.3%. That represents a range of 12.9% slower (Warhammer) to 12.8% faster (Borderlands) — the usual suspects for games that strongly favor either one GPU vendor or the other. The remaining seven games are all less than a 10% difference, with most less than 3% — Far Cry 6 favors AMD by 7.8% as the only other larger difference.
The 4080 Super versus 4080 comparisons don't really change. Overall, the Super is 3.6% faster with a range of 0.5% to 5.5%. Factory overclocked RTX 4080 cards can easily make up that difference, so it's less about providing a new level of performance and more about the price cut.
The 4090 also maintains its substantial lead, averaging 28% faster overall. Flight Simulator ends up at least partially CPU limited still, but every other game shows at least a 20% advantage for the 4090 over the 4080 Super, and as much as a 40% lead (Borderlands 3, with Warhammer close behind).
RTX 4080 Super 4K Ray Tracing Performance
4K ray tracing at native resolution punishes every GPU, and the 4080 Super is no exception. Of the six games shown here, only Spider-Man breaks 60 fps. Metro and Minecraft get reasonably close, landing in the mid-50s, and Control is in the high 40s. But Cyberpunk only just squeaks past the 30 fps mark while the Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark comes up 1–2 fps short. The 4090 can't break 60 fps in all of these games either, bet it gets there in four of the games and is at least in the 40 fps range on the other two.
There's not much more to say about the 4080 Super versus the vanilla 4080. It's 3.3% faster overall, ranging from 1.7% to 4.7% faster. Perhaps more interesting is that it's still 20% faster than the newly launched RTX 4070 Ti Super. Both use the same AD103 GPU with 16GB of memory, but the 4080 Super has 21% more GPU processing cores. The additional memory bandwidth ends up being mostly a non-factor.
And of course, if we look at AMD's fastest GPU, it's not even close. The 4080 Super delivers 42% higher performance overall, ranging from 23% in Spider-Man to 88% in Minecraft, with the other four games all in the 30~45 percent range. But these are all older games from 2022 and earlier. Let's check some 2023 releases.
RTX 4080 Super 4K Bonus Games
4K with our bonus games doesn't change the 4080 Super versus 4080 story — we're still looking at less than a 5% advantage in all cases. And also expected is that Alan Wake 2 destroys non-Nvidia GPUs, Avatar is a bit more moderate, and The Last of Us gives AMD's 7900 XTX a very slight lead.
Full path tracing at 4K, even with upscaling, requires all the GPU computational power and ray tracing hardware you can manage. The 4080 Super more than triples the performance of the 7900 XTX, while the 4090 comes along with a healthy 39% lead over the backup 40-series quarterback.
Avatar still has ray tracing, though the resulting improvements in image quality (without using the Unobtanium preset) aren't as immediately visible. The 4080 Super leads the 7900 XTX by 17%, and in turn sees the 4090 once again with a 27% lead.
The Last of Us is well-known as a game that favors AMD hardware — it was an AMD promotional title last year — and even with the latest updates the 7900 XTX still edges past the 4080 Super. It's not much of a lead, only 1.9%, but that's about as good as it gets for AMD right now. The 4090 again leads the 4080 Super by a substantial 32%.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
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