NVIDIA RTX 4080 Review - Before You Buy..

so it's finally time to take a look at the RTX 4080 and today we're going to discuss if this thing is actually worth picking up and it's a heavy one yeah this will actually launch with the three slot cooler that you'll also find on the 4090 as far as I can see it's the exact same design and this is actually the only 4080 that you need to worry about for now uh you might have seen at launch there was a 12 gig and 16 gig that were announced but after the insane backlash that Nvidia received regarding the 12 gigabyte model because turns out when you take a closer look it's actually a really cut down card and video decided to I guess recall or revise that product and you will probably see that coming out in the future under a different name or you know different pricing as well but for now we have the 16 gig model and that's all we need to worry about right now but yeah I was pretty surprised to see such a beefy cooler design for a 320 watt card I guess Nvidia this time around don't want to like re-engineer a different cooler design for the lower TDP like they did for the 3090 and the 3080 and it's funny you put this next with 3080 it looks like a mammoth of a GPU also interesting to note whereas the 3080 used a dual 8-pin power adapter the 4080 uses a triple eight pin power adapter which is one less eight pin from the 4090 and then taking a look at the specs the Cuda cores have been bumped up only slightly compared to previous gen 9728 in total although clock speeds have seen a huge boost of around 50 percent then when it comes to the vram it's both better and worse there's an extra six gigabytes of video memory on board but with a Slimmer memory bus width and all this for an MSRP of 1200 US dollars that looks pretty alarming next to the 700 price tag of the 3080 but if we're all honest it was pretty rare to see it around that price most of the 3080s that I saw following launch were closer to the 1 000 USD Mark what is kind of alarming though is how much more cut down the 4080 is compared to the 4090 it's definitely not the same story as previous gen where the 3080 and 3090 were pretty closely matched in terms of Cuda cores and overall silicon and especially when it came to gaming performance here though there is an enormous difference between the two which is odd because the pricing is closer than what it was for the 3080 and 3090 and this Begins the discussion because if you're already in the market for a 1200 GPU then surely you're also in the market for a 1500 GPU you know it's kind of within the same scope and if the 1500 product is a measurably better GPU then maybe it's actually worth paying extra for to find the answer to that question of course let's take a look at performance now quick note on the test bench here pretty standard stuff ryzen 5800x 3D with 32 gigabytes of 3600 cl16 memory and a beefy 1000 watt power supply basically a super stable bench with no CPU bottlenecking inside so starting off with Pure rasterization Performance in other words gaming without any Ray tracing or dlss in the mix and yeah the 4080 is a good chunk faster than the previous previous gen 3080 the games here aren't going to be as dramatic as what we saw with the 4090 versus the 3090 but we still see a healthy 60 gain here or so in Forza Horizon 5. basically the 4080 can deliver a 4K 120 hertz experience without any drop in quality settings pretty comfortably to be honest that is a warm-up though for the 4090 the Cuda core difference on paper between these gpus yeah it reflects pretty accurately when we take a look at gaming performance as well in Forza Horizon the 4090 was 36 percent faster than the new 4080 which isn't bad at all for 25 more cash similar story in God of War at 4K Ultra settings the 4080 leaves the 3080 by a comfortable 50 plus and the 4090 can almost show that margin again here it's 40 faster than the 4080. so evidently there's a pretty big gap between the 40 90 and 4080 more than enough to fit a 4080 TI and a 4080 super as well no doubt the RTX 4080 impressive but it's also making the 4090 look like kind of a good deal and then here's a bit of a generational look on things we've got the 2080 super versus the 3080 versus the new 4080 without the 4090 in the picture the 4080 looks ridiculously quick if you're coming from a 2080 or 2080 super you'd be getting well over double the FPS by upgrading to the new RTX 4080 granted you're not CPU bottlenecked or hitting game engine limits in the end when we're looking at pure rasterization gaming performance without any RTX here's how the 4080 Stacks up against RTX 1390 which is more of an interesting comparison than you might think you see when I bought my own 3090 directly after it launched it was around 2700 AUD and I expect the new 4080 to also land at a similar price on average here we're looking at around a 34 gain for the new 4080 over the previous gen 3090 and realistically that's pretty respectable it's only when you also include the 4090 in the picture then we get some additional perspective so green is now 40 90 and gray is the 4080 and there's basically no compromising here at 4K for either of them I think we'd all agree both are brutally fast and can play games completely maxed out here no problem these would look even more Overkill at 1440p so just keep that in mind this is at 4K Ultra settings but let's just say that if you're in the market for a beefy upgrade both the 4080 and 4090 should be in the picture while the 4080 is ridiculously quick paying an extra 300 us or 25 more for a 36 buff in frame rate that's kind of an unheard of gain when we're looking at Enthusiast tier gpus what's more typical is paying hundreds of dollars for a measly 10 or so that's exactly what we've seen on previous generations but it's not what we see here now if you play a lot of single player games and you're currently on a 20 series or a 10 series GPU the new 4080 can do ray tracing and AI upscaling extremely confidently even at 4K this is really the first generation of gpus where you don't even have to think twice about enabling settings and as far as I've tested and actually played with them these are actually beneficial settings that wasn't the story with the 2080 super which struggled immensely with first gen RTX and even with the 3080 you did have to do some tweaking and playing around to play at suitable frame rates as you can see though the 4080 has no problems at all in addition to the faster gaming performance overall and the more capable Ray tracing and AI upscaling it's worth mentioning a few exclusive features on the new 4080 and 4090 the first one is a dlss setting called frame generation basically what this does is inserts fake AI generated frames between the actually rendered ones and the result is a pretty considerable bump to your frame rate if you're just playing as you would normally and passing through the Game World you actually can't notice these fake AI frames they just blend in super well the difference in smoothness though is definitely noticeable 75 FPS here versus 105 FPS it's a pretty nice bump there is unfortunately a slight increase in latency though when you enable this setting which you'll fill with additional input lag it's not a problem if you're just kicking back and playing on a controller I'd say in that regard you can't actually feel it but it is noticeable if you're playing on mouse and keyboard and you're really looking for that input lag difference in my opinion after testing it and playing with it it's actually a pretty cool setting for these really demanding single player games I just really wish it was also somehow available for the 30 series and 20 Series gpus in fact side by side to the 3080 without frame generation but with Ray tracing and dlss performance mode on both the new 4080 can basically run with over double the frame rate which is a really massive difference it's also worth noting that frame generation is pretty effective in delivering frame rates Beyond CPU bottlenecks so in games like cyberpunk or flight simulator where your typically CPU bottlenecked pretty early on this is a pretty cool setting to break past that now another exclusive feature that you'll see on the 40 series gpus is the Dual envanc encoder setup that can encode in av1 we looked at this briefly in the 4090 review but yeah if you're someone who does game streaming or game recording this can enable a higher quality result compared to nvank on previous gen which can sometimes look extremely blocky especially at lower bit rates the 4080 can deliver significantly better looking footage now the visual Gap to be fair between h.264 and av1 it does close the higher bit rate that you're using but in my comparison so far every setting side by side av1 has always looked noticeably better now it's important to note that shadow play which is the kind of background recording for nvidia's gpus that will still record in h.264 so if you want to make use of the magic av1 at the moment you'll need to use ovs so along with dlss frame generation this is one of the main exclusive features that you'll see on the new 40 Ed it'll also enable faster video exports as well here in DaVinci Resolve Studio we save a good chunk of time for a 4K export then if you're after faster 3D rendering performance here in blender we get a 44 faster render time compared to the 3080 which to be fair is a rendering beast in its own right at the kind of blistering speeds that you're seeing here on the 40 series for 3D rendering you can expect faster viewport performance faster still renders and much faster renders if you're doing lengthy stuff like animations as we mentioned when it came to gaming though probably also considered that 40 90 as an option especially if you're doing this stuff for work in vra5 here there's actually a pretty big difference between the two 40 90 here is 45 faster when rendering with RTX and 40 faster with Cuda in terms of power consumption and thermals the 4080 is surprisingly good it runs less power in fact than the 3080 which pretty much runs at 320 Watts the entire time here in furmark the 4080 pulled around 300 watts and most of the time in game it pulls a little bit less than that and thanks to the beefy triple slot cooler thermals and noise levels are just not a problem I left the card running for an hour here while I went and grabbed some lunch and it topped out at just 64 degrees C with a room ambient of 23. now the first question that I asked myself before making a big Tech upgrade or just any purchase in general is you know what does this enable me to do that I couldn't do previously does it give me a better experience or does it you know save me a lot of time or does it make my life easier in any way uh you know at least in regards to the first two the 40 series gpus are definitely raising the bar quite a bit I mean you get uncompromising 4k gaming performance and they do have exclusive features the dlss frame generation and the Dual envanc encoders they do enable you to do things that you couldn't do before now it goes without saying that if you're already on a 30 series GPU like a 30 70 or a 3080 for example and especially if you're not interested in those exclusive features then this is going to be a waste of money for you you're just not going to get that benefit of the additional experience or those exclusive features and especially if you don't have like a 4k monitor or a high refresh rate 1440p monitor you're not even going to be able to see the extra frames that you'd be getting it is however a pretty colossal upgrade if you're coming from a 20 series GPU or earlier even if you're coming from a 2080 TI there's a pretty meaningful upgrade to be had there before you even factor in the heavy stuff like 4K or Ray tracing again though it is kind of within Arm's Reach of the 4090 which is a more powerful GPU so definitely take a look at the pricing in your region consider what monitor and power supply you're going to be pairing with either of them and then maybe make your decision based off that as well but yeah 4080 versus 4090 it is a realistic discussion and the 4090 is oddly the better pound-for-pound GPU by the looks of things so far so it goes on sale tomorrow uh we'll see where the pricing ends up that's going to be really interesting versus the 4090 uh but yeah otherwise hopefully you enjoyed the review as always a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one

Channel: optimum

Views: 165,006

Keywords: RTX 4080, 4080 review, nvidia 4080, nvidia 4080 vs 4090, optimum tech, 4080 gaming, 4080 dlss, 4080 ray tracing

Id: dI7RbdwlhCU

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022