GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Review, Nvidia Fails to Read the Room

[Music] welcome back to harvard unboxed it's hard to believe it's been almost nine months now since nvidia unveiled its first ampere-based product the geforce rtx 3080 though i suppose it might have also felt like an eternity for those of you who've been trying to get one for the past nine months or so the rtx 3080 was a hugely exciting product when it was first released back in september of last year it offered 20 greater performance on average over the rtx 2080 ti with a suggested retail price that was around 40 lower the only issue of course being the fact that you couldn't really buy it as it sold out in seconds and then tracking one down at the msrp a few months after release was extremely difficult and really verged on impossible now nine months later it's still virtually impossible to get your hands on an rtx 3080 with all retailers still out of stock and of course it's absolutely impossible to get one anywhere near the msrp as cards are regularly selling on ebay for over two thousand dollars us since the release of the 3080 nvidia's also spat out a fully unlocked version of the ga102 silicon called the rtx 3090 and it costs a cool 1500 us basically it made no sense whatsoever and i said as much in my day one review last year after that we got the rtx 3070 which was based on the smaller ga 104 die and at almost 40 percent smaller it's possible for nvidia to get many more of these dyes out of a single wafer and it would seem as a result supply has been slightly better but ultimately still quite terrible also sharing the ga 104 die is the rtx 3060 ti probably the hardest to find of all the ampere-based gpus and that's because nvidia has been prioritized in the higher margin 3070 and with seemingly strong yields there's been little need or incentive to produce the lower margin 3060 ti then most recently received the geforce rtx 3060 based on the 300 millimeter squared geo 106 die and it's meant to cost 330 us but of course you can't buy it and you certainly can't get one for anywhere near the msrp so here we are gamers still can't buy a graphics card in mid 2021 or at least not easily and pricing is still sky high ideally we'd like to see amd and nvidia release sub 300 us products which would help to ease the supply of shoes and give gamers a better chance of buying a graphics card at a more reasonable price but rather than do any of that nvidia's refreshing ga 102 with the geforce rtx 3080 ti yup another super expensive gpu just nine months after releasing the first set of super expensive gpus that you still can't buy so why are they doing this well in short to make more money at least that's my take now if you don't believe in videos selling gpus directly to miners which happens to be our opinion we believe it's the aibs and or distributors who are selling to miners in large volumes so if that's the case nvidia is missing out on a lot of money here of course they're still doing very well out of the rtx 3090 sales but letting go slightly defective geo 102 silicon for less than half of the price probably stings quite a bit right now so rather than do that they've segmented further with the rtx 3080 ti allowing them to maximize profits of silicon that's not quite good enough to be an rtx 3090 meaning rather than sell a good portion of the defective silicon as a 700 product they can now extend the profit margin by roughly 70 percent this all means that the rtx 3080 ti exists purely to make more money shocker i know and in an effort to convince you that it's worth more than the rtx 3080 the 38 you can't buy right now anyway they're throwing in an extra 2 gigabytes of vram couple that with an 18 increase in cores and the wider 384 bit memory bus and you basically have an rtx 3090 with half the vram we're talking about just two and a half percent fewer cores than the 3090. even at 4k the rtx 3090 is just 13 faster than the 3080 on average so you can expect the 3080 ti to be very similar to the 3090 in terms of performance and likely only around 10 faster than the 3080. that makes the 3080 ti about as pointless as the 3090 given that at msrp it should cost little over 70 more than the 3080 for maybe 10 more performance so well beyond the point of diminishing returns that's probably not a great way to start this review but there's really no mystery here sometimes with these refreshers we get an odd mix of core and memory configurations but that's not the case this time the 3080ti has basically the same memory subsystem as the 3090 with a few less cores with that said let's go over a few benchmarks using the foundation model and please note all benchmark results are based on amd and nvidia gpus running at the official specifications so no factory overclocking in total i've tested 12 games at 1080p 1440p and 4k but we're only going to look at the data for a few of the titles while the rest will be made available to our floatplane and petro members but of course the all-important dozen game average data will be included in this video we've also got some power overclocking and ray tracing data to go over as well it's also worth noting that all of this data is fresh and this is the first time it's being made available after weeks upon weeks of testing we now have all of our data up to date on the new ryzen 9 5950x test system which has been configured with 32 gigabytes of dual rank dual channel ddr4 3200 cell 14 memory okay let's get into the results first up we've got the death stranding results at 1080p and here the 3082i delivered 3090 light performance we're talking a one to two fps margin here and that meant the 38 dti was just four percent faster than the 3080 but quite a bit slower than the 6800 xt and 6900 xt increasing the resolution of 1440p allowed the 3082 item matched the 6800 xt while it was again delivering 3090 light performance this also saw it beat the 3080 by a 9 margin so not far off the 10 margin i was expecting to see then finally at 4k the 3082 i matched the 3090 exactly with 121 fps on average making it just two and a half percent slower than the 1600 xt it was also 13 faster than the rtx 3080 so again basically what we were expecting to see moving on to the watchdogs legion results we find more of the same that is to say that the rtx 3080 ti is basically an rtx 3090 with half the vram the 3082i did slip behind the 3090 at 1440p though here it was still only five percent slower but still 12 percent faster than the rtx 3080 so again basically we'd expect a product of this configuration to sit then at 4k the 380ti was just three percent slow on the rtx 3090 and 13 faster than the 3080 making it just five percent faster than the radeon rx 6900 xt of course in a normal market if you cared about value you'd get either the 6800 xt or rtx 3080 next up we have assassin's creed valhalla here we're looking at 96 fps on average at 1080p using the maximum in-game quality settings this meant that the 38dti was just four percent slower than the 3090 and just three percent faster than the 3080. then at 1440p it's slotted in right between the 3080 and 3090 with 82fps on average it's also worth noting that while watchdog's legion isn't an nvidia sponsored title assassin's creed valhalla is an amd sponsored title that said the radeon gpus do have a massive performance advantage here the 1600xt for example was a massive 28 faster than the 3080ti then moving to 4k sees the rtx 380 ti average 59 fps allowing it to match the rtx 3090 and 6800 xt though it was still 11 slower than the 6900 xt moreover when compared to the rtx 3080 we're looking at a mere 7 performance increase the last game we're going to bother looking at is cyberpunk 2077 and at 1080p we're looking at comparable performance between the 3080 ti 3090 and 6900 xt this meant that the 3080ti was just 10 faster than the original 3080. then at 1440p the new 3082i is just 8 percent faster than the vanilla 3080 and five percent slower than the 30 90 and we're also looking at comparable performance with the radeon rx 6900 xt finally at 4k the 38dti was just four percent slower than 3090 and 11 faster than the 3080 and then six percent faster than the 1600 xt so similar margins to what we've seen in the previous three titles so let's stop looking at the game benchmarks and just jump to the 12 game average okay so at 1080p across the 12 games tested the geforce rtx 3080ti is and wait for it basically an rtx 3090 with half the vram we're talking about two percent slower on average and just six percent faster than the rtx 3080 and for those of you seeking maximum performance for low resolution competitive gaming the 6900 xt is slightly faster offering seven percent more performance on average now at 1440p the margins do grow a little bit here the 38dti was four percent slower than the 3090. that said it's now only five percent slower than the 6900 xt so overall for rasterization performance the radeon gpu was a little bit faster than a dozen game sample while offering even more vram finally at 4k the 3080ti is able to beat the 600xt albeit though by just a three percent margin it was again just four percent slower than the rtx 3090 and just nine percent faster than the rtx 3080. now for a look at power consumption and for this review i'm going to focus on the total system results and put the nvidia pcat testing on hold i'd like to further investigate power consumption soon as a few of you have pointed out that nvidia is technically cheating here but offloading most of the scheduling work to the cpu which increases cpu consumption and lowers gpu consumption therefore measuring the total system provides a much more accurate picture of power usage so here's a look at power consumption in doom and as you can see the rtx 380 ti is very similar to the 3080 and 3090 again slotting in between the two in this example the 3080 ti was on average six percent faster than the 600 xt and doom but push total system usage nine percent higher so rd and a2 is slightly more efficient though overall it's going to make a very little difference to gamers the margin would no doubt increase in amd's favor if we isolated the cpu and gpu power usage and that's something that we might start to do in the future okay so here's a quick look at some ray tracing results and we'll start with metro exodus enhanced all testing has been conducted at 1440p and even without the aid of dlss we're seeing some pretty impressive frame rates here the rtx 3080 ti was good for 90 fps on average using the highest quality in-game settings though do note that variable rate shading was set to 4 times anyway because the rtx 3082i is basically an rtx 3090 the ray tracing performance is also basically the same that means titles that were designed with nvidia's ray tracing implementation in mind will perform pretty horribly on radeon gpus and that's what we're seeing here with the 1600 xt which was 28 slower for normal ray tracing and 38 slow off ultra and of course the geforce gpus are much faster again with dlss enabled resident evil village works much better with radeon gpus and as a result the 1600 xt is a lot more competitive here and despite still trailing the 380ti by 18 margin performance overall was still very impressive of course when discussing the 3080ti results they're again best summed up by saying it's basically an rtx 3090 lastly we have watchdogs legion and again this is an nvidia sponsored title that's optimized to work with nvidia's ray tracing implementation as a result the 6900xt fares quite poorly and the 38dti again mimics 3090 light performance before wrapping up the testing i do have a few aib cards on hand so we'll look at those and then do some very quick overclocking now nvidia's own founders edition model appears to have just borrowed the cooler from the rtx 3080 as they appear physically identical however whereas the rtx 3080 featured a total board power rating of 320 watts the 3080ti jumps up to 350 watts so a 9 increase this increased power saw the peak operating temperature rise by 2 degrees to 77 degrees and the fan speed increased by 200 rpm to 2100 rpm so as far as the end user experience is concerned they're basically the same under these conditions the fe model averaged a core clock speed of 1770 megahertz which is well above the advertised gpu boost clock but of course that's how nvidia's gpu boost works anyway it's quite an impressive result for a dual slot graphics card so bear that in mind as we take a look at the much bigger aib models we'll start with the asus rtx 3080 ti tough gaming this is basically just a copy and paste of the original 3080 tough gaming and i've got to say that's not a bad thing as that model was excellent as i discovered in a detailed review last year this new 3080ti version works remarkably well peaking at just 64 degrees in our stress test with a fan speed of 2000 rpm and here it averaged a core clock speed of 1830 megahertz asus also sent over the new rog strix lc rtx 3080 ti oc and this is another highly impressive graphics card last year i checked out the rog strix lc version of the 6800xt which worked very well and my only real criticism was the mess of cables that ran from the radiator to the graphics card thankfully though asus took note and has now slaved all of those cables with the liquid cooling tubes for a much neater package out of the box this model peaked at just 49 degrees with a fan speed of just 1500 rpm and that allowed for an average clock speed of 1920 megahertz so a 5 increase over the tough gaming model while running 15 degrees cooler and even quieter of course this premium model will be much more expensive but that's just par for the course when discussing these liquid cooled graphics cards then finally also on hand is the new msi rtx 38 eti supreme x a gigantic air cooled graphics card to give you an idea of just how big and heavy this thing is the foundation model weighs 365 grams and the tough gaming 1400 grams the supremax though it comes in at grams measuring 332 millimeters long 140 millimeters tall and 60 millimeters wide it's a beast but despite the massive dimensions the results are less than impressive as the card picked at 78 degrees saw a whopping 14 degrees hotter than the tough gaming though it was a bit quieter as the fans spun at just 1600 rpm still if noise normalized i don't expect it will be able to beat the tough gaming the calls also clocked at 1875 megahertz which is just a two and a half percent increase over the tough gaming overall not a bad result it's just not particularly impressive given the weight and dimensions now here's a look at how they performed in shut off the tomb raider at 1440p both stock and overclocked i was only able to squeeze four percent more out of the foundation model hitting 1885 megahertz on the cause with the memory at 21 gigabits per second the tough gaming was a mere one percent faster out of the box and i was only able to squeeze a further three percent from it hitting 178 fps on average with a core frequency of 1900 megahertz the liquid cooled asus rog strix lc was the most impressive managing 178 fps out of the box and with the 1980 megahertz overclock went up to 192 fps so that's an additional 8 performance making it 13 faster than a stock rtx 3080 ti not exactly amazing stuff but that's gpu overclocking these days the supreme x was also able to match the rog strix lc out of the box though it did fall short when overclocked but this will come down to silicon quality so don't read too much into the overclocking results here they're an extremely rough guide at best so there you have it the new geforce rtx 3080 ti as i've already said a number of times now it's basically an rtx 39 with half the vram and while it is meant to be cheaper with an msrp of 1200 us you can expect to pay rtx 3090 pricing so thousands upon thousands of dollars it's basically just a way for nvidia to sell silicon that couldn't be binned for use in a 30 90 at a higher price normally this sort of thing wouldn't be an issue in fact a refresh like this is kind of expected but the reason this refresh is an issue is due to the fact that nvidia hasn't finished releasing ampere i mean where are the affordable sub 200 us models or even the sub 300 us models so come on nvidia read the room there's just no way this release is going to sit well with gamers and after all the talk about trying to help gamers with hardware limiters for mining they then turn around and release the rtx 3080 ti it's just so damn tone-deaf i'm really not sure what else to say about this release the rtx 3080ti is impressively fast it is technically an excellent product and the extra 2 gigabytes of vram is very welcomed but at 1200 u.s and with the current stock issues it's just a poorly timed release that frankly makes no sense at least from a gamer's perspective now you might have noticed that i've skipped over our usual cost per frame graph obviously with pricing the way it is comparing the value of these products is rather pointless and i see little sense in using these scalper prices as they're a bit all over the place and an average of what you're seeing online almost certainly won't be representative of what you'll be seeing and say a week from now so in short as i've already said multiple times now like the geforce rtx 39 to your radeon rx 1600xt in a normal market the 3080ti makes no sense and in terms of cost per frame you'd be far better off buying the rtx 3080 or if you really care about vram capacity the 6800 xt anyway i've really got nothing else to say on this one apart from the fact that it looks like nvidia we're a bit blown out of the water at computex this year by amd's announcement of fsr or fidelity fx super resolution which we'll be analyzing shortly or tim will be analyzing that for us shortly but the fact that amd is claiming to be improving the performance of older geforce gpus and potentially killing off dlss in the process well that's just a horrific blow to nvidia and it came just ahead of this 1200 us money grab yikes of course amd still has a lot to prove with fsr in terms of image quality and game support but the announcement was impressive and certainly something that's being celebrated by gamers i'm not sure we can say the same thing about the 1200 rtx 3080 ti if you enjoyed the video give it one of those please subscribe for more content we will have the rtx 3070 ti review shortly on the channel uh of course we will be analyzing stuff like fsr and just plenty more gpu related content as well as all the usual stuff we do here at harvard unboxed also if you'd like to support the channel directly floatplane patreon links for those are in the video description that will get you access to monthly live streams that to myself where we discuss stuff just like this in a bit more detail or a bit more personally uh behind the scenes content q a's an awesome discord server great community over there so if you're interested in joining that again links are in the video description check it out if not perfectly fine and i would like to just 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: 208,796

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: n4_4SKtq_Gs

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/xenago]

Weird title, seems like Nvidia read the room perfectly. They'll make money hand over fist from this high margin product

[u/BarKnight]

I think NVIDIA read the room just fine. They saw what cards are actually selling for on the market and adjusted to it. Sucks if you need a card right now, but the cost of even 5 year old used cards is crazy.

[u/TwoCoresOneThread]

I guess actually getting one of these for $1199 is way better than paying that (or more) for a regular 3080, at least

[u/Hellascrupman]

Maybe steve can bless us with links to 3080 at msrp. The 6900xt going price is higher considering it's worse all things considered, but I'll take a link to that at Msrp too while he's at it.