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We're not going to spend a lot of effort dissecting the 1080p gaming results. Yes, the RTX 4080 can run 1080p ultra very fast — about as fast as anything currently available. Perhaps a CPU upgrade would create more of a separation, but with our 12900K, the 4090 is only 8% faster than the 4080 for our standard test suite, though it remains 26% faster with the ray tracing games.
Naturally, the high-end previous generation cards also manage 1080p just fine for the most part. Because of that, the RTX 4080 only beats the 3090 Ti by 10%, RTX 3080 Ti by 18%, and the 3080 10GB by 26%. AMD's RX 6950 XT continues to perform very well at 1080p, thanks to its large Infinity Cache, and the 4080 lead shrinks to just 5% — with half of the games in our standard suite favoring the AMD card.
Ray tracing at maxed-out settings still isn't "easy," however. Compared to the RTX 30-series cards in the charts, the 1080p ultra DXR margins of victory are basically the same as at 1440p. The 4080 is also still 90% faster than the RX 6950 XT. We didn't bother with DLSS testing at 1080p, but it should still provide a decent boost.
Even so, the RTX 4080 really isn't built for 1080p gaming. Lighter games might run at 480 fps on the latest and greatest 1080p monitors, but they'd probably run just as fast on a slightly cheaper GPU as well. Perhaps in the next couple of years, games will again get more demanding and the 4080 might start to become less CPU limited, but we recommend it mostly for higher-resolution displays.
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