12GB GeForce RTX 3080 Review, Shameless Cash Grab Edition

[Music] welcome back to how we're unboxed so a few days ago now nvidia released i guess you could say the new 12 gigabyte variant of the rtx 3080 which sounds like it's pretty much the same as the original rtx 3080 but with two gigabytes more vram and while that is the gist of it there is a little more to it along with the extra memory there's a three percent increase in core count and an eight percent increase for the rops and this sees the 12 gigabyte model jump up to a 384 bit wide memory bus for a 20 increase in memory bandwidth despite the fact that it uses the same 19 gigabits per second gddr6x memory so the key advantage here is the 20 increase in memory bandwidth and capacity all said and done the 12 gigabyte 3080 will land between the original 3080 and 3080 ti in terms of performance and i suspect it will often be closer to the 3080 ti so a nice little upgrade there of course the problem with the 12 gigabyte 3080 is the same problem we face with all graphics cards right now pricing and availability given the performance it's no surprise to find that the 12 gigabyte model is positioned between the original 3080 and 3080 ti and depending on where you are the 12 gigabyte 3080 might actually be slightly better value than the 10 gigabyte model so i suppose you could argue that it's a welcomed upgrade personally though i'd rather nvidia remained committed to improving availability of the product they released in september of 2020 one which many people are still waiting for the original 10 gigabyte rtx 3080. anyway we'll touch on that more towards the end of the video for now let's go over the test system specs and then jump into a few benchmark results for testing i'm using our ryzen 9 5950x gpu test system featuring 32 gigabytes of dual rank dual channel ddr4 3200 cell 14 memory as for the gpus all have been tested with the default amd and nvidia clock specifications so no factory overclocking and that means the msi supreme x model used to test the 12 gigabyte 3080 has been down clocked to the official specification now please note that while we have decided to start testing cpus with resizable bar enabled we're yet to do the same for gpus and the reason is this for cpus it's a platform feature so when reviewing a cpu we're accurately portraying the performance of that product when using resizable bar but for gpus it is a little different although rebar is technically still a gpu feature we don't want to assume that everyone has a ryzen 5000 series processor using rebar with older ryzen processors and of course intel cpus will lead to different results and in many cases it's not even properly supported well supported at all for example the radeon rx 6800 xt receives around a 20 boost in assassin's creed valhalla with resizable bar enabled when using our ryzen 9 5950x test system but if we had for example a core i9 9900k this feature isn't even supported so no performance gain there via resizable bar and yes we do know that some motherboards supporting the 9900k do have that feature but if you enable it it doesn't work very well if at all now this is an issue because the rtx 3080 only receives around a five to ten percent boost with resizable bar enabled in assassin's creed valhalla and that gives amd a massive advantage on our ryzen 5000 test system an advantage you're unlikely to see on almost all other platforms so until recessable bar is supported and works well on a wide range of modern platforms we're going to limit its use to cpu slash platform testing okay so with that disclaimer out of the way let's get into the benchmark data okay let's start by going over the assassin's creed valhalla data starting with the 1080p results here the 12 gigabyte 3080 along with the original 3080 and 38dti all delivered basically the same result and here we are architecturally bottlenecked with ampere as it's unable to efficiently feed all the cores at this lower resolution leading to the 6800 xt delivering around 14 more performance that margin though is halved at 1440p with the 6800 xt now just seven percent faster than the 12 gigabyte 3080 and this saw the updated geforce gpu basically matching the 3080 ti while offering an extremely mild six percent gain over the original 10 gigabyte 3080. then at 4k the new 12 gigabyte 3080 overtook the 6800 xt beating it by an eight percent margin while beating the original 3080 by 10 it was also within a frame of the 3080 ti so basically we are looking at 380ti light performance in this title next up we have far cry 6 and here where cpu limited at 1080p and that means basically no difference in performance between the 3080 variants along with the 380ti and 3090. it's actually pretty similar story at 1440p with these high-end gpus and although the 600 xt hits the lead it's well down when it comes to the 1 low performance now at 4k those weaker 1 lows of the radeon gpus are gone likely because the frame rates aren't driving quite as high and we're now seeing the 12 gigabyte 3080 matching the 6800 xt with 77 fps on average placing it pretty well between the 10 gigabyte version and 3080 ti watchdogs legion presents us with more of the same at 1080p the radeon gpus generally perform better while the 12 gigabyte 3080 can be found situated between the 10 gigabyte 3080 and 3080 ti but generally closer to the ti model moving up to 1440p sees the new 12 gigabyte model outpace the 10 gigabyte version by a seven percent margin making it just four percent slower than the 3080ti and roughly on par with the 6800 xt then as expected the ampere gpus fare best at 4k here the 12 gigabyte 3080 was 11 faster than the 6800 xt which is a commanding lead and just three percent behind what was achieved by the 3080 ti last up we're going to take a look at the cyberpunk 2077 results but i have tested eight more games and will make those graphs available to float plane and patron members but for the purpose of this video we're going to skip all of that repetitive data and just jump to the 12 game average after looking at cyberpunk of course the 1080p data is pretty much as expected the 12 gigabyte 380 basically matched the 38dci making it a fraction faster than the original 3080. at 1440p the margins open up a little bit the 380 12 gigabyte is now five percent faster than the 10 gigabyte version and just three percent slower than the 3080ti technically the 3080 is now faster than the 6800 xt though that margin is ultimately worthless then at 4k the 12 gigabyte 3080 i know this video i've said 3080 way too many times but there are now technically three 30 80 products and i'm talking about all from this video anyway the 3080 it nudged ahead of the 6900 xt to beat the 6800 xt by an eight percent margin making it just four percent slower than the 3080 ti so that's probably enough looking at the individual game data let's just move on to the averages so here's the 12 game average data at 1080p and as you can see the small upgrade has allowed the 12 gigabyte 3080 to match the 6800 xt so if the original 3080 and 3080ti weren't quite close enough for you in terms of performance the new 12 gigabyte model is just one and a half percent slower than the ti model so that's some seriously heavy product segmentation from nvidia there but then we are only looking at the 1080p results jumping to 1440p we see that the original 3080 and 6800 xt are evenly matched so that means the mere 5 boost offered by the 12 gigabyte model is enough to hit the lead i suppose technically but it is a rather pointless margin and it is now just three percent slower than the 3080 ti when compared to the radeon competition ampy is again at its best when compared at 4k and here the 12 gigabyte 3080 was 10 faster than the 6800 xt which is a reasonable margin that said it is just a six percent improvement over the original 3080 and four percent slower than the 3080 ti so pretty well smack bang in the middle there and again heavy product segmentation from nvidia on this one as for the power consumption i suggest taking the 12 gigabyte 3080 numbers as more of a ballpark figure and that's because for most of these cards i've used the nvidia found edition model which is better power optimized when compared to msi's beefy supreme x even though the supreme x is down clocked the voltages aren't optimized at the default clock speeds and this increases power usage had we received an fe model i'd expect power consumption to land somewhere between the original 3080 and 3080ti before wrapping things up let's take a quick look at ray tracing but of course like the rasterization results nothing will have changed from the original 3080 and 3080 ti testing for example in cyberpunk 2077 the 6800xt is crippled with any form of rage racing enabled with the highest settings hitting frame rates by 46 percent the 12 gigabyte 3080 is still hit very hard dropping 31 of its original performance but enabling dlss restores frame rates to roughly what we saw without rt enabled of course image quality isn't quite as good as native but the latest version of dlss in this title does work very well so for the full effect ray tracing plus dlss is probably going to be the way to go but whatever your preference there are more options available with the rtx 3080 ray tracing in far cry 6 is more subtle let's say though some areas of the game do look very impressive with it enabled as an amd sponsored title this is one of the better optimizations for rd and a2 gpus so the 6800xt is respectable here watchdog's legion on the other hand is an nvidia sponsored title so really no surprises here it was also released well before amd's rdna 2 architecture so very little optimization for radeon gpus has been done here as a result the 6800xt takes a 53 performance hit with the higher quality rtfx enabled while the 12 gigabyte 3080 takes a 39 hit but again with dlss enabled it can restore most of that performance seeing with the ultra quality settings which boost the performance by 33 with dlss enabled alternatively you can just enable dlss without ray tracing and here that resulted in a modest nine percent gain resident evil village is an amd sponsored game so like far cry 6 we find that ray tracing isn't used quite as heavily and it's used in a way that works better with amd's implementation still we're looking at a 49 hit for the 6800 xt with a 35 hit for the 12 gigabyte 3080 though in both cases performance at 1440p is still excellent now here's a look at how the msi rtx 3080 12 gigabytes supreme x performs out of the box after 30 minutes of gameplay the gpu temperature peaked at 77 degrees which is quite high though we're looking at a relatively low fan speed of 1 500 rpm which meant the card was basically whisper quiet so quite impressive given the gpu power was up around 390 watts also the typical core clock speed was 1905 megahertz and of course the memory operated at 19 gigabits per second then overclocked our sample peaked at 78 degrees with a very slight increase in fan speed and here it averaged 1950 megahertz so a mere 2 boost from stock and going any higher would cause the card to crash the memory also peaked at 20 gigabits per second so an insignificant five percent bump there so stock the supreme x wasn't far from being maxed out so that's how the geforce rtx 3080 12 gigabyte performs and as expected no real surprises for nvidia though this 12 gigabyte version uh how do i put this it's particularly useful to them it's a much more profitable product it does boost their margins quite significantly when compared to the original 10 gigabyte model and that particular model allowed nvidia's partners and the distributors to cash in on the current market situation of course we'd rather they just look after loyal customers who ordered an rtx 3080 at a reasonable price 16 months ago but clearly they have no interest in doing that so there's really no two ways about it the 12 gigabyte rtx 3080 is a shameless cash grab that allows nvidia to further capitalize on the current market so we know exactly why nvidia has released the 12 gigabyte 3080 and why they're not crazy about reviewers getting their hands on them but what does it mean for consumers frankly not a lot for those of you holding out for cheaper prices will have to continue to remain patient and nvidia's move to further segment the ga 102 lineup does nothing to improve supply there's really no good news here unfortunately unless you plan on paying way too much for a graphics card the 12 gigabyte 3080 is already on sale locally here in australia and when compared to the 3080 ti i guess you could say it's um not sure how to put this but better value right now pc case ski has the supreme x version of the 10 gigabyte 3080 12 gigabyte 3080 and 380 ti all in stock the original 10 gigabyte 380 can be had for 2 400 while the new 12 gigabyte version is 2 600 and then the 38 dti is 2 900 so that's an 8 premium over the 10 gigabyte model and a 10 saving when compared to the 3080 ti so based on that the 10 gigabyte model still offers the best value overall but the 12 gigabyte model is better than the 3080ti so yippee of course you shouldn't buy any of them as this 16 month old technology should cost eleven hundred and forty dollars at the recommended retail price here in australia for the 10 gigabyte 3080 and with the cheapest model at pck ski listed for 2 200 that means right now we're at a 93 premium over the nvidia recommended retail price and then over in the us we see that newegg.com has a few 12 gigabyte 38s listed in their newegg shuffle but of course they're out of stock despite starting at just over 1200 u.s and that's a 71 premium over the original rtx 3080s msrp so again you should avoid and really refuse to buy a graphics card at those prices other than that though i haven't got much more to say about the 12 gigabyte rtx 3080 and yeah again i think i've said 3080 too much but it probably won't be the last time i say it before this video ends so apologies in advance but later this month tim will have one of his detailed gpu pricing updates so we will have more information about pricing there but there won't be too many surprises i don't imagine and of course it's not going to change our opinion anyway you simply shouldn't buy it right now and on a final note the msi rtx 3080 uh 12 gigabytes supreme x it is a beast of a graphics card quite impressive but also you know let down by the fact that the price is probably absurd so it's really hard to get excited about or say that it's particularly great but that's really no fault of msi's but i suppose if you're going to get price gouge and you're willing to accept it then you know this is a good model to get rolled on if that makes sense but anyway good product works well just unfortunately can't recommend it in the current market so that's going to do it for this one if you enjoyed the video please do give it a like you can subscribe for more content because we do have a lot more new gpu reviews coming up this month uh so that some of them shall be should be quite interesting but anyway i won't say too much but yeah plenty of content coming up some other unrelated stuff that's also going to be really interesting and fun so yeah make sure you subscribe for that also you can become a hardware box community member we have float plane and patreon you'll get access to monthly live streams tim and i do those they're a lot of fun you can ask us questions they're live and yeah it's a good time we have an awesome discord server so great if you want to talk about pc related or really anything it's a great place to hang out behind the scenes content i just released a new behind the scenes video and q and a's alright cool stuff there at our float plane and patreon accounts you can sign up to either of one of those and it gives you access to everything so check it out if you're interested but if not perfectly fine i would like to thank you for watching this video i'm your host steve and i'll see you again next time [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 267,319

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: oBDFtJ4lR2c

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Rift_Xuper]

This doesn't matter , It will sell out eventually.

[u/chasteeny]

Im impressed how close it is to a Ti. Honeslty didn't expect it to do that much better

[u/k2theablam]

Market correction edition. Sucks as a consumer but I'm not mad at them for it when AIBs are openly charging 1500+ for a 3080

[u/MmmBaaaccon]

I don’t get why people get mad about this. Doesn’t affect the consumer at all. Prices would be at this level even if Nvidia had a fake MSRP’s like AMD (6770’s are are like a grand retail not scalped.) Videos like this are a cash grab if you ask me.

[u/Traumatan]

doesnt matter, sold out anyways

[u/lbiggy]

I'm confused as to what card I even what I want to try to get anymore

[u/48911150]

I wonder if HUB is gonna use the same title for the 6500XT

[u/erctc19]

Nvidia deserves a used gpu flood, so Gamers can finally take care of Nvidia like Nvidia did for Gamers.

Nvidia is an absolute greedy trash company.