Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super review: Slightly faster than the 4080, but $200 cheaper

Native 1440p gaming actually makes a lot more sense on the RTX 4080 Super — and most other high-end / enthusiast GPUs. It also acts as a stand-in for 4K with Quality mode upscaling. There's a slight performance hit from the upscaling algorithms, but the relative positioning of the various GPUs should be pretty close to what we'll see here.

RTX 4080 Super 1440p Overall Performance

There's not much to add to the discussion from the previous page. 1440p ultra doesn't pound the GPUs as hard, and a few of the margins shrink a bit — like the 4090's 21% lead over the 4080 Super — but the gap between the vanilla 4080 and its replacement still sits at 3% overall.

Similarly, the 4080 Super also leads the 7900 XTX by 15% overall, with a slightly larger lead than at 4K. That's because all the extra bandwidth of the 7900 XTX does help it more at 4K. But it's only a 1% change, so not really anything to discuss.

Nvidia's RTX 4090 still claims top honors, naturally. Where it was 32% faster than the 4080 Super at 4K, the lead drops a bit to 21% at 1440p — even including games like Flight Simulator where we're fully CPU limited on both GPUs. As we noted back when the 4090 launched in October 2022, CPU bottlenecks can be a factor on that GPU, even at 1440p ultra.

RTX 4080 Super 1440p Rasterization Performance

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As we noted above, 1440p doesn't benefit from AMD's extra bandwidth as much as 4K, and the result is that the 4080 Super takes the lead over the 7900 XTX in rasterization performance. It's not much of a lead at just 2%, though, and AMD does maintain a slight lead in a few of the games.

The 4080 Super ends up just 2.6% faster than the 4080 now, and 14% faster than the 4070 Ti Super. We're definitely not fully CPU limited, but it does show up as a factor in a couple games — Far Cry 6 and Flight Simulator being the two main culprits. In fact, the 4080 Super is barely any faster at 1440p than at 1080p in those two titles.

The 4090's lead also shrinks substantially at 1440p. Where it was 28% faster in the rasterization games at 4K, it's only 15% faster at 1440p. We'll really need faster CPUs to shift the bottleneck back toward the GPU at 1440p and lower resolutions, and that will be even more applicable when the next generation GPU architectures arrive, though that's still probably a year or more away. Alternatively, we need more demanding games, like our ray tracing suite.

RTX 4080 Super 1440p Ray Tracing Performance

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DXR doesn't affect the Nvidia vs. Nvidia story much, except that because all the games become far more demanding, CPU bottlenecks aren't really a factor. The RTX 4090 leads the 4080 Super by 30% here, while the 4080 Super is only 3% faster than the vanilla 4080 — basically the same delta as we measured at 4K.

The 4080 Super also leads the 7900 XTX by 39%, nearly the same as at 4K. It's a big difference, with every game we tested breaking the 60 fps mark on the Nvidia card while a couple of the games land in the low 40s on the AMD GPU.

Upscaling can of course help at 1440p as well, so if you enable DLSS — or FSR 2/3 on AMD GPUs — you can typically boost performance by 30–50 percent without too much of a loss in image fidelity.

RTX 4080 Super 1440p Bonus Games

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Our bonus games range from being slightly to significantly more demanding than our existing test suite. Alan Wake 2 shows how future path traced games might perform — the gap between Nvidia and AMD remains massive, though now the 4080 Super is 'only' 164% faster. The 4080 Super as usual barely beats the 4080.

The gap in Avatar is slightly larger between AMD and Nvidia at 1440p: 22% compared to 17%, as the demands on the memory subsystem favor Nvidia a bit more here. Both cards provide very playable performance, with Quality mode upscaling breaking 100 fps. Note that the native 1440p performance would be slightly higher than what we measured at 4K, since that used 1440p with upscaled to 4K.

The Last of Us ends up one of the few cases where AMD can still come out ahead of the 4080 Super, barely. It's 3.7% faster, so not something you'd actually notice in practice.

As we've said before, our main takeaway is that Nvidia's hardware provides access to potentially new experiences — like the full path tracing in Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 — that just don't run well at all on AMD's GPUs. If the uptake of path tracing in remastered games takes off, using RTX Remix as an example, we could see quite a few 'mods' in the coming years where Nvidia's GPUs will have a massive performance advantage.

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