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Given the price, we'll start with the performance that matters most: 4K at maxed-out settings. Some might argue that the xx80-class of Nvidia cards fit better with 1440p gaming monitors, but that's only true when they don't cost $1,200 or more.
There are several ways of looking at performance. The RTX 4080 delivers 78% of the performance of the RTX 4090 for 75% of the price. Alternatively, it's 21% faster than the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti and 51% faster than the RTX 3080. Except it's more of a replacement for the RTX 3080 Ti, in which case it's only 38% faster than the card it replaces.
As for AMD's previous generation cards, the RTX 4080 beats the RX 6950 XT by just 29% in our standard gaming suite. However, if AMD's claims of 50% to 70% more performance from the RX 7900 XTX prove true, the RTX 4080 could be in a lot of trouble next month.
The gains are decent overall, but after the RTX 4090 review, they don't feel particularly amazing. Remember, the 4090 beat the previous generation 3090 Ti by 56% and the RTX 3090 by 72%, and the price was roughly in the same ballpark. RTX 4080 improves gen-on-gen performance, regardless of which Ampere card you care to compare it against, but the improvement is more like what we've seen with previous generations of hardware, and the price is generally much higher.
For example, the RTX 3080 10GB was 35% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, and it was priced $500 lower. This time, the RTX 4080 is 51% faster than the 3080 10GB, but it costs $500 more. That's a 71% increase in generational pricing, unless you're willing to pretend the 3080 didn't exist and focus only on the 3080 Ti.
Some games are still bumping into CPU bottlenecks, so it's also useful to look at the best-case and worst-case results. The biggest improvement we measured relative to the 3090 Ti was 49% (Total War: Warhammer 3), but some of that likely comes from the newer drivers. Forza Horizon 5 also improved by over 40%. But several games show less than a 20% improvement, and Flight Simulator was in the single-digit percentage points at 8%.
As for overclocking, considering we're bumping into CPU bottlenecks with the Core i9-12900K, it's no surprise that the boosted GPU and memory clocks don't help very much. We measured an average performance improvement of 6.9% across our standard suite, ranging from 4.4% (Forza) to 9.6% (Borderlands).
DLSS 2 Quality mode also improved performance by 18% in Red Dead Redemption 2 and around 35% in Horizon Zero Dawn and Watch Dogs Legion. Flight Simulator and Forza Horizon 5 both have DLSS 2 support now as well… but performance remained unchanged in our testing. It's potentially a bug in the DLSS implementation of Forza, while Flight Simulator is still fully CPU limited — which is where DLSS 3 comes into play.
Our ray tracing test suite proves far more demanding, fully eliminating any CPU bottlenecks at 4K — and in fact, some of the results are barely playable. Overall, the RTX 4080 delivers 26% more performance than the 3090 Ti, is 48% faster than the 3080 Ti, 72% faster than the 3080, and just over twice as fast as AMD's RX 6950 XT.
All six games support DLSS, and that tacks on another 89% using Quality mode — that doesn't include Minecraft, which automatically applies Performance mode at 4K. Overclocking still doesn't do much, providing a 7.4% bump in framerates.
While most of the games are technically still playable, the RTX 4080 really needs some form of upscaling — or alternatively, DLSS 3's Frame Generation — to deliver smooth framerates with maxed-out ray tracing settings at 4K. These results also show how much the Ada Lovelace architecture has improved Nvidia's RT performance, yet again keeping a wide gap between the Nvidia and AMD GPUs, though we'll have to see how RDNA 3 fares next month.
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