Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Reviews: A Significant Performance Upgrade

Expectations for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 couldn’t have been higher when it originally launched because it had to dramatically outperform Nvidia’s top-tier graphics card from the Turing era. Like the rest of the Nvidia Ampere, the RTX 3080 has risen to the occasion, offering quick 4K gaming at a reasonable rate. MSRP completely redefines the performance of top-tier graphics cards as they are not entirely inexpensive.

The RTX 3080 appears to represent the biggest generational gain in power I have seen in a very long time compared to the cards it replaces. It performs 20 to 30 percent better than the card Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and, more amazingly, 50 to 80 percent better than the card Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080.

If you prioritize performance over price and power, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is the greatest graphics card on the market. It holds the top position in our GPU benchmark hierarchy. Let’s look at the specifications of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 before doing an in-depth review.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Specifications

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Features

Let’s have a look at the features of the Nvidia Geforce Rtx 3080

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Price and availability

Find the Nvidia Geforce Rtx 3080 on Amazon.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Design

For the RTX 30-series, Nvidia significantly revised the look of its Founders Edition cards. The new design still has two axial fans. Still, Nvidia significantly altered the PCB and shortened it, so the “back” of the card (the part that isn’t facing the video ports) only has a fan, heat pipes, radiator fins, and the standard graphics card covering. According to Nvidia, the new design significantly increases cooling efficiency while also reducing noise levels.

The new card is extremely attractive and feels very sturdy in hand. It is the heaviest single-GPU card Nvidia has ever made. It is roughly 100g gloomier than the initial RTX 2080 design. Additionally, it employs the standard two-slot width and is about 2 cm longer than the cards from the previous generation. The GeForce RTX 3090’s enormous three-slot cooler is almost ready to make the 3080 FE look crazy.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Pros and Cons

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Aesthetics

The aesthetics of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 are very subjective, so while many individuals have preferred the new design, others have said it is uninspired. The only illumination is a white GeForce RTX logo on top of the card with soft lighting surrounding the ‘X’ on both sides (albeit just half of the ‘X’ is lit up on the side with the “RTX 3080” logo). There is no RGB bling if that’s your thing.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Power Delivery

I have mixed thoughts regarding the new 12-pin power connector, but it is undoubtedly there in terms of power supply. I wish that the 2 x 8-pin PCIe to 1 x 12-pin adapter Nvidia offers was a little longer because it’s obvious that the new PCB design of the Founders Edition card needs this smaller connector to make this new cooler work.

Even though it’s currently difficult to make any factual statement about the power delivery, I believe that aftermarket cards won’t be used immediately. However, it’s important to note that Nvidia is making the 12-pin power connector design open to any manufacturer that wants to utilize it, including AMD.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Performance

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is in a league of its own, easily outperforming the RTX 2080 Ti when examining the real benchmark results. This a tremendous generational jump when you consider that the RTX 2080 was only 40% faster than the GTX 1080 in our Nvidia GeForce GTX. The RTX 3080 starts by being a remarkable 63% faster than the RTX 2080 and 26% faster than the 2080 Ti in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme.

However, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080’s performance further widens the high-end performance gap between Nvidia and AMD. One of the top AMD graphics cards, especially in gaming performance, is the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. However, it can’t compete with the RTX 3080, which outperformed every artificial benchmark we ran.

If you limit performance on both the 2080 and 3080 to the same level, Nvidia claims the RTX 3080 can offer a 90% increase in performance per watt. Overall, the results of its performance are quite efficient.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Memory Arrangements

There are four memory chips on the GPU’s left and right sides, up to three above the GPU (two mounting places are unfilled for the RTX 3080), and one below the GPU. This memory configuration is also intriguing. Again, Nvidia made a significant effort to make the board and other components smaller to make room for the new and enhanced cooling architecture that performs admirably.

Ten of the twelve 32-bit memory channels that GA102 provides are active on the RTX 3080. To leverage its GDDR6X memory, which uses PAM4 signaling to improve data rates even higher than previously, Nvidia collaborated with Micron. GDDR6X operates at 19 Gbps in the RTX 3080, compared to the RTX 20-series cards’ peak speeds of 15.5 Gbps in the 2080 Super and 14 Gbps in the other RTX cards. This results in 760 GBps of bandwidth combined with the 320-bit interface, which is a 70% increase over RTX 2080.

Memory Controllers

Error Detection and Replay, or EDR, is a new capability added to the memory controller of the RTX 3080. Instead of crashing or altering data when the RAM detects a failed transmission, it just tries again. It will continue doing this until it succeeds, even though memory overclocking still has the potential to bring the system to a halt.

It’s interesting to note that even while higher memory clocks would be possible with EDR, performance would still suffer. This is because when a transmission fails, the EDR lowers memory performance. More on this will be covered in the overclocking section.

Nvidia GPU: An undefeated beast

The Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) in Nvidia GPUs each have a certain number of SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors). Each SM is divided by Nvidia into four divisions, each of which can work with a different data set. Ampere has added 16 FP32 CUDA cores, 16 FP32/INT CUDA cores, a third-generation Tensor core, load/store units, and special function units to each SM partition. There is a single second-generation RT core, and the entire SM has access to a shared L1 cache and memory. That equals 64 FP32 cores overall, 64 FP32/INT cores overall, four Turing cores overall, and one RT core overall. Let’s dissect that a little more.

Concurrent FP32 (32-bit floating point) and INT (32-bit integer) operations are now supported by Turing GPUs. There is still a sizable number of INT operations used for address calculations, texture lookups, and numerous other types of code. FP32 tends to be the most significant workload for graphics and games. The INT data path is improved to handle INT or FP32 with Ampere, but not both at once.

Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080: Should you buy it?

Conclusion

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card represents one of the biggest generational advances in GPU history and is an amazing monster. Even though the advantages are lessened at lower resolutions, this graphics card is worth considering for anyone interested in quick 4K gaming.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 lowers the barrier to entry for high-end gaming by enabling the finest PC games to operate at higher resolutions and refresh rates while costing less.

There are less expensive cards with better value propositions, but when it comes to the elite class of graphics cards, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is the best value for those who have the cash to spend but want the greatest return on their investment. For those who can afford the entry price, we highly recommend it as the best graphics card.

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