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We were more than a little underwhelmed with the Zotac RTX 3080 Ti Amp Holo Black, which basically tied the Founders Edition in terms of performance. The Asus ROG Strix LC scoffs at such paltry improvements and zips past the other 3080 Ti cards, then keeps right on going as it waves to the RTX 3090. Currently, the Asus ROG Strix LC RTX 3080 Ti is the fastest graphics card — out of the box — that we've ever tested.
Overall, the Asus card was 7% faster than the Zotac and Founders Edition cards at 4K ultra, and 4% faster than the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. Okay, that's not a massive difference, but it's at least measurable and consistent. We even saw up to a 12% lead over the other 3080 Ti cards in Watch Dogs Legion and The Division 2, and the Asus was up to 7% faster than the 3090 FE in individual game results at 4K.
We start to encounter some GPU bottlenecks once we drop to 1440p, and it's only going to get worse at 1080p. AMD's Big Navi architecture also tends to do better at lower resolutions, as the Infinity Cache provides proportionately larger improvements in effective bandwidth. There were several games in our suite where AMD's RX 6900 XT beats even the Asus ROG Strix LC, and at 1440p Horizon Zero Dawn joins Assassin's Creed, Borderlands 3, and Forza Horizon 4 in favoring Team Red. Still, overall the Asus card was 5–6% faster than the Zotac and Nvidia cards, and 2% faster than the RTX 3090. It was also 5% faster than the RX 6900 XT.
Cards like the RTX 3080 Ti aren't really intended to run at 1080p, at least not without other stuff like ray tracing. The Core i9-9900K becomes more of a limiting factor, and the 128MB Infinity Cache on AMD's Navi 21 GPUs helps push the RX 6900 XT to the top of the overall chart. Of course, that's also thanks to our use of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which is laughably biased toward AMD's latest GPUs. Then again, even Watch Dogs Legion has the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT beating the fastest Nvidia GPUs.
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