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Even though the RTX 4080 is the second-fastest graphics card right now, it's still clearly hitting CPU bottlenecks, especially in our standard test suite. While the 4080 was 22% slower than the 4090 at 4K, it's only 10% slower at 1440p. This is definitely a card that wants a higher resolution monitor — 3440x1440 ultrawide would be a bit more demanding than 2560x1440, but 4K remains the better choice for non-ray tracing games.
The gap between the 4080 and previous generation cards shrinks as well. It's still 17% faster than a 3090 Ti, 29% faster than a 3080 Ti, and 40% faster than the 3080 10GB, but those aren't massive gen-on-gen gains. The lead over AMD's 6950 XT has also shrunk to 14%, which could mean a serious blowout from the RX 7900 series when those arrive. Overclocking doesn't help much either, providing just 3.8% more performance.
Since the 4080 inherits the 3080 Ti's price point, let's stick with that comparison for more detail. Looking at the individual game charts, the 4080 ranges from being 8% slower in Flight Simulator (the 40-series still underperforms there compared to the 30-series, possibly due to drivers) to being up to 70% faster (Total War: Warhammer 3), with Borderlands 3 also showing around a 40% improvement.
If you use a 1440p monitor, the 4080 might be better than the overkill 4090. It's basically tied with the 4090 in half of the games, and the biggest gap (Borderlands 3) is only 23%. With both GPUs easily clearing 144 fps, this is about as fast as you would reasonably need to go for 1440p gaming purposes… until we get to the ray tracing results.
Complex ray tracing games remain mostly GPU-limited still, with the 4090 leading the 4080 by 34%. Meanwhile, the 4080 beats the 3090 Ti by 27%, the 3080 Ti by 47%, the 3080 by 66%, and the RX 6950 XT by 96%. The margins are a bit smaller than at 4K, but of course both AMD and Nvidia will generally agree that ray tracing games are one of the best options for using some form of upscaling.
With DLSS Quality mode (Balanced in Minecraft), RTX 4080 performance improves by 62%. That's enough to go from clearing 60 fps in all six games to breaking 100 fps. You'd still want a monitor with G-Sync (alternatively a G-Sync Compatible FreeSync display) support for the best experience, but even the most demanding games are well within reach of the 4080.
The 7% GPU overclock and 13% GDDR6X overclock help a bit as well, increasing performance by 6.6%. That suggests the GPU clocks are more important than the memory, though both contribute to the gains. As we'll show later, the minor boost in performance from overclocking also requires more power, though in the case of the 4080 Founders Edition, it's not too bad.
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