RTX 3080 vs RTX 4090: The Ultimate Comparison

before I even roll the benchmarks I'm going to respond to the question I know I'm gonna get which is why compare a 30 80 against a 40 90 and I'm gonna give you three reasons number one because if you're considering buying a GPU right now for the pretty high-end experience either at higher refresh rate 1440p or going into 4K gaming I think the 3080 on the Nvidia side is kind of the best value because if you go past if you go lower performance than that you're really you know pushing the kind of experience you're gonna get and then if you go higher than that with like a 30 90 or 30 90 TI I think there's a lot of diminishing returns on the value whereas the 4090 represents what if I just throw value out the window and buy the best of the best is it worth it what is the difference number two reason why I'm comparing them is a lot of people who bought an RTX 3080 in the first year and a half of its existence probably paid around what a 40 90 costs now due to the whole crypto Mining and whatnot chip shortage everything in other words the people who bought 3080s have one now and now they're looking at the 40 90 should I upgrade might have already been used to buying in this you know Seventeen hundred dollars plus price range and number three reason is because it's actually the personal situation I'm most familiar with I've been gaming on my 30 80 12 gigabyte and we are testing a 12 gigabyte version in this video um I've been gaming on the 30 to 12 gigabyte as my main gaming GPU for the last I don't know six months or so and now I've switched to the 4090 tested it out extensively and I can give you my thoughts on what it is like to switch from one to the other and how worthwhile is the upgrade because I mean it absolutely is an upgrade but how worthwhile in this video we're testing out the RTX 3080 12 gigabyte it's the gigabyte Eagle version at its stock out of the box settings and we're testing out the 40 90 gigabyte gaming OC version at its stock out of the box settings and they are are both running fine on my 850 watt power supply and my r95950x 32 gigabytes of 3600 CL 16 memory that's the test system let's roll the benchmarks let's start by taking a look at plague tail Requiem this game is incredibly demanding and your 30 80 12 gigabyte is not going to be maxing it out at 4K Ultra at least without you know dlss or something like that this game is even demanding on consoles because it's not looking for console backwards compatibility with the last generation and so as we start to see next-gen consoles only and I think they're pushed into 1440p 30fps in this game I will start to see I think system requirements go way up soon and that's something to think about however the 3080 does have dlss quality available to it and that does help it stay over 60 FPS a lot of the time although definitely not all of the time in this game however the 4090 also has dlss quality available and we can see that it's over 100 FPS at 4K so we can see that the 4090 is enabling a truly High refresh rate 4K experience here especially if you're willing to use dlss quality now if we look at these gpus at 1440p Ultra then this is the native 1440p Ultra without dlss the 3080 12 gigabyte is over 60 FPS here although not by a whole lot and there are more demanding scenes than this one whereas the 4090 is almost doubling its performance with over 120 FPS in the same scene which is extremely impressive now I want to look at the 4090 against the 4090 and let's talk about dlss frame generation we have dlss quality on the left dlss quality with frame generation on the right and one thing you want to look at here is the image quality I'm actually very happy with the image quality of frame generation in this game we'll talk about Spider-Man in a minute but the image quality here I thought looked pretty good this game moves pretty slow paced if you try to swing the camera around fast which honestly if you're playing this game with a controller you'd never really do I think I can get a little bit of image breakup around the edges of the character here's it compared to dlss Quality which I think is just a little bit more stable around the edges and I can try to show them side by side but honestly guys I don't think this is picking up really well in the YouTube video and YouTube compression will kill a lot of in motion as well but I'll say that I actually like the image quality I'm trying to slow it down here a bit but I think frame generation looks pretty good in this game especially how you'd actually play the game and especially if you're using a controller dlss frame generation also can boost your frame rates in CPU limited situations we can see ourselves not getting much boost from dlss quality because we are CPU limited look at the GPU utilization in the middle screen here whereas dlss frame generation can significantly boost the frame rate it's actually boosting it past 120 FPS which is a pro problem and the main reason why I am not using frame generation in this game my monitor is 120 hertz and dlss frame generation is not compatible with vsync you can try to force it on but introduces horrible input latency I actually did not mind the input latency added by just using dlss frame generation but I hated the screen tearing now in plague tale I liked the image quality in Spider-Man I don't as he moves quickly over objects because it's a much faster paced game with more rapid camera swinging and Spider-Man swinging um you can like watch as he climbs over this building and shoots past this building and back over it I'll try slowing it down here for you to see it easier but in person this was actually very noticeable to me and so in Spider-Man even if vsync worked properly and even though it's helping me in CPU limited situations with Spider-Man has a lot of I'm not using frame generation so in the two games that I actually have that support frame generation I'm not using it both of them because because they don't support vsync well which is a problem and I get screen tearing and in Spider-Man because of the image quality however the input latency at the high frame rates I was running at and in these types of games not a competitive shooter a single player game the input latency didn't bother me unless I tried to force on vsync in which case the input latency was horrible now here we're seeing dlss quality rather than dlss frame generation in the same scene and I think you guys would agree again it's hard to say how well it shows up on YouTube that I think this looks better I think there's less breakup as Spider-Man moves quickly over objects but also look at the frame rate the frame rate is much lower and I'm definitely CPU bottlenecked necked here badly and I'm on an R9 5950x I know there's better CPUs out there these days but this game can get incredibly CPU bottlenecked I'm slowing it down here a bit here at dls's quality it's not exactly the same movements I made for frame generation but this isn't really a scripted Benchmark it's just me web swinging around but I don't really see the breakup in image quality anyway where near the way I do with frame generation because well it's just a different technology and has different issues so long story short I'm not using dlss frame generation in either of the titles that support it now let's go ahead and look at the 3080 12 gigabyte up against the RTX 4090 in Spider-Man remastered here we're running 4K very high RT with no dlss and you could see that in that beginning scene the RTX 4090 was getting significantly better frame rates almost double but you can see here it's not that far ahead and that's because it's CPU limited look at the GPU utilization on the 4090 it's nowhere near 100 because I'm getting CPU limited and actually look at how it's bringing down the power the 4090 here is only using around 280 Watts now if we enable dlss quality the 4090 doesn't really gain any performance because it's still CPU limited whereas the 3080 12 gigabyte is starting to catch up to the RTX 4090 because again it had more room to gain from lowering the resolution through dlss so it's really an interesting situation here now again you if you have the latest CPU you'd do a little better here in your 4090 but even then you might end up CPU limited the 5950x isn't that far behind some of the newest generation as of the time of filming now here we're seeing frame generation on the right versus dls's quality on the left because the 3080 doesn't support frame generation so if you're willing to use frame generation it can help you in CPU limited situations here and now you can see us kind of almost doubling the performance of the 3080 again but like I said for me the image quality and the screen tearing are too much of a problem with frame generation for me to use personally now let's switch to some other games how is cyberpunk 2077 now if you try to play this game at 4K Ultra you can see that the 30 80 12 gigabyte simply can't give you a high refresh rate experience whereas the 4090 is going to be over 60 FPS most of the time although we did still see some dips below 60fps even on the 4090 and guys I don't even have Ray tracing turned on yet but we can definitely see good performance here we can see that the 4090 is drawing more power interestingly here we're under 400 watts whereas in plague tail we saw the uh saw it going up more to its 450 watt power Target which again is interesting we can also see that the GPU cooler is definitely keeping up on the 4090 like I said I have the gigabyte gaming OC version and hasn't had any issues cooling it now keep in mind just because it's keeping the GPU cool doesn't mean it's not exhausting tons of wattage worth of heat into your case so that's certainly something to look uh to look at also just a reminder not to judge the smoothness of the experience based on what you see look at the frame graph the image capture doesn't always show show this you know the smoothness of the capture because you're seeing 60fps video whereas I'm on a variable refresh rate screen so it's not always matching up now if we enable um the settings you would actually probably play with on a 3080 if you're playing at 4K when I played this game at 4k on my 3080 I basically went with the high settings with dlss quality and it keeps me over 60 FPS most of the time but if we put those same settings on the RTX 4090 we can actually see that we're well over 100 FPS and actually if you keep an eye on the GPU usage the 4090 is now actually slightly held back by my CPU you'll see it especially as we cross the street in this little bit further section of the Benchmark but we can see that you know it's mostly getting uh you know getting its full performance we're at 94 there rather than the full you know 99 or something like that and again if you actually look at the power draw right now the 4090 is report reporting about the same power draw if not a little bit less than the 30 80 12 gigabyte and producing significantly significantly higher frame rates at the same setting let's go ahead and take a look at the actual results where the 3080 is getting 72 and a half average whereas we're getting over 120 FPS average for the 40 90. massive difference but that doesn't mean that the 4090 can just max out the game because the maximum settings in this game are ultra settings plus all the ultra Ray tracing plus manually changing the RT lighting up to Psycho now I'm not showing it to you at Native because you can see right here even with dlss quality the 4090 actually dips below 60 FPS whereas the 3080 notice this is not a like for like test the 3080 is just not able to get a 60 FPS experience at maximum settings at 4K in this game even going down to dlss Performance you can get closer if you go to dlss ultra performance but honestly that looks so bad there's so many little like moire uh issues and just lack of detail and aliasing all over the place honestly even dls's performance to me is is not usable on a high-end situation I would much rather turn the settings down but you can see here that the 4090 with dlss quality which still looks pretty good can enable you to max out the ray tracing in cyberpunk although we've seen that they're going to be adding an even higher demanding array tracing overdrive setting which um wow if it's more demanding than this that's going to be pretty be crazy now what we're looking at here again is not a like for light comparison what I want to look at here again is if you actually wanted to play the game with Ray tracing on a 3080 at 4K what sort of settings might you want to use and here we're seeing if you use RT Reflections you can use dls's performance to be over 60fps a lot of the time whereas on the 4090 if you want to go with those RT psycho settings if you go down to dlss balanced which is a little more aggressive than we saw last time on the previous Benchmark you're actually going to be over 60 FPS a lot more of the time and I would be a lot happier with the frame rate now I'm not sure if these are the settings I would actually use because to me I can spot some downgrades to being at dlss balanced versus you know native or even dlss quality although dlss balance still does look quite good now this also gives you guys a chance to see is RT psycho worth it you're seeing it up against Art just RT reflections at the ultra settings and the lighting is better with rt psycho but the game still looks quite good without it so it's kind of up to you how you want to go there and maybe that high refresh rate settings make more sense to you but you know you might also be considering these gpus for 1440p so we'll we'll throw some of those tests in here as well we can see that 30 80 12 gigabyte at 1440p Ultra does well although it's not a super high refresh rate experience enabling dlss quality does get it to a higher refresh rate experience whereas the 4090 at 1440p Ultra with no dlss is actually a little bit CPU limited if you look at the GPU usage percentage on my 4090 you'll see that it's frequently dipping into the lower 90 percent range meaning that it's probably being held back by the CPU um but not by much so again if you had an even faster CPU you might get slightly better performance here on the 40 90 at 1440p Ultra and that's actually just one thing that we'll kind of see throughout these tests is that if you think about using the 4090 as a high refresh rate 1440p GPU you really want to make sure you have the absolute fastest CPU available because like I said 5950x isn't the fastest thing around anymore but it's not slow and it has trouble keeping up with the 4090 at 1440p in a lot not every but a lot of situations but can we Max the game out at um can we Max the game out at 1440p well on the 3080 12 gigabyte what if we wanted to use some Ray tracing well if you use RT Ultra with dlss quality the 3080 12 gigabyte is dipping below 60 FPS but a lot of times it's also over 60 FPS you'll average around 60. whereas the 4090 can use the RT psycho settings completely Max the game out without DLS us but in a lot of scenes it's still actually still around 60 FPS although if you do then enable dlss quality you see a massive performance gain from the 4090 and you can see you can get a high refresh rate absolute maximum settings other than going down to dlss Quality on the 4090s so Ray tracing psycho High refresh rate on a 4090 absolutely possible but for the high refresh rate you do need dlss still so is there room for NVIDIA to Market a 4090 TI I mean there are games that you aren't able to max out at Native settings with a high refresh rate even on a 40 90. I mean there's always room for more frames right guys but let's go ahead and just for fun take a look at 1080p here can both of these gpus max out cyberpunk at 1080P and you might have thought the 30 80 12 gigabyte could do it but it actually can't I mean it can but can it do it at the kinds of frame rates you'd probably expect a 3080 to get at 1080p no we're well below 60 FPS most of the time the 4090 on the other hand is uh you know closer to the 100 FPS definitely a high refresh rate experience and once again depending on the scene can even be slightly held back by the CPU here and again enabling Ray tracing settings actually increases CPU workload which is interesting and a lot of people don't realize that it is incredibly demanding on the GPU but Ray tracing also increases the CPU draw calls and it does reduce the maximum like right here you see it right here look at the 40 90. it dropped it's dropping into the 80 something percent um GPU utilization here because of CPU limits as we went through that populated area in the city center so interesting test but you know I don't think 1080p is going to be the target resolution unless you're playing competitive games on like uh what are there are the 500 Hertz monitors out yet I don't know anyway here we're going to look at some other games so let's look at some more Ray tracing this is Guardians of the Galaxy at 4K with the game on with the ultra settings but then with all of the RT settings turned on as well this game has Ray traced Reflections and we can see that the 30 80 12 gigabyte was struggling so I just kicked on dlss quality to see how well it could try to catch up and you can see that the game is playable with dlss quality with rt Max although it's you know not a super high refresh rate experience the 4090 is still winning even with even at the native resolution so certainly a win here for the 40 90 although the 3080 is certainly playable and I played this game on the 3080 and actually turned down the settings on Ray tracing a little bit and got a lot better performance but here we'll go ahead and look at the RT Max settings at 1440p and we can see that the 4090 is actually CPU limited again look at the GPU utilization we're dropping down around 81 percent now down to 78 77 so there's certainly a lot more Headroom for the 4090 if you have a faster CPU so certainly keep that in mind and once again that's one of the things that we're going to see here the 4090 can deliver crazy 1440p refresh rates in a lot of games you're gonna uh have a lot of trouble getting a CPU that can keep up but if you turn off Ray tracing the 4090 is actually CPU Limited at 4K Ultra once again look at the GPU utilization and we're only getting about 82 percent out of the 4090 here you know we went up higher there for a bit a little bit lower but yeah the 4090 is CPU Limited at 4K Ultra in this game and I mean you're getting all the frame rates you need so probably just you know lock the frame rate where you want it to be but let's go ahead and look at shadow of the Tomb Raider and look at Ray tracing again so this is the game I switched over to the highest preset and then turned on um Ray traced Shadows to ultra so this game only features Ray traced Shadows so it's not the most impressive Ray tracing situation and I'm going to ahead and kicked on dlss for the 3080 to see how much it could try to catch up to the 4090 and it doesn't catch up but it does get you a well over 60 FPS experience now so you certainly could play the game at 4K if you don't mind dls's quality which actually looks pretty good at 4K and in this game even brings you in some more details from a distance with the increased LOD bias I think um anyway but 4090 doing an excellent job here now if we turn off the ray tracing and just look at the 4K when I say highest I mean the highest preset that's actually the name of the preset in this shadow of the Tomb Raider game we can see basically doubling the performance they both did well though and 1440p they can both easily max out the game's Ray traced settings with high refresh rates although we can actually see the 4090 here doubling the performance of the 3080. so let's jump over to God of War now this is a pretty demanding game but not as demanding as you know plaguetail Requiem and it's also not Ray tracing so here we're seeing 4K Ultra settings and as he turns the corner here this is more typical of actual gameplay we can see the 3080 a little over 60 FPS if we add in dlss quality which is how I played the game I played it at ultra settings with dls's quality enabled and did well the 4090 though is around 120 frames per second so again that 4K uh dream of high refresh rate is alive at 1440p they're both delivering an excellent experience um and you know extreme extreme settings here in Forza Horizon 5 as well as extreme frame rates so we're going to look at some games pretty quickly now where we can just see that a lot of games the 3080 already delivers a high refresh rate experience at 4K so it's not really all that interesting the 4090 delivers an even higher refresh rate and is still CPU limited look at the GPU utilization we could have got more out of it if we had an even faster CPU and I do have resizable bar enabled and this is on the driver update that gave us some increased performance in this game which is nice to see so remember the 490 would have done even better here if it wasn't CPU limited crazy that your CPU Limited at those frame rates at 4K anyway 4K ultimate settings in Horizon zero Dawn to look at other Horizons here um we're once again uh getting incredibly High maximum settings frame rates at 4k on the 40 90. although the 3080 is getting very good settings as well so I mean they both did great excellent so not a lot to say there if you look at it at 1440p the the RTX 4090 is so CPU limited that it is doing better than the 3080 but not by that much but once again it's not that it's not that much better than the 3080 it's just that it's at such a high refresh rate that my 5950x can't keep up so you would have seen a much bigger Gap there not that it matters when the frame rates are this High both of them are as high as you would need in a game like that so let's take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2 2 where we see at the favor quality maximum so I slid the preset slider all the way to the right the 4090 is delivering a high refresh rate maxed out experience again again I would have to kick on vsync or a frame rate limiter to stop screen tearing which I can because I'm not using the dlss frame generation because this game doesn't have it 30 to 12 gigabyte with DSS quality can get you a higher refresh rate experience but still comes nowhere near the 4090 and I have mixed feelings about dlss in this game it cleans up some of the TAA in the game but it also I think makes the hair look kind of bad so anyway there's the end of Benchmark results if you go ahead and look at it at 1440p we're once again seeing the 4090 a bit CPU limited by my 5950x look at that GPU utilization it's dropping into the mid 80s but they're both delivering such high refresh rate experience it doesn't really matter so we've seen the comparison is it worth it to buy a 40 90 over a 3080. well I hope you guys were convinced that the 3080 can absolutely still deliver a solid 4K gaming experience but it's usually targeting a 60 FPS sometimes a bit more sometimes a bit less and you do have to tweak settings use dlss and things like that to get there now there's certainly less demanding games where you can go a lot higher refresh rate at 4K that's absolutely true but we're talking mostly about more graphically demanding experiences that are coming out recently now the RTX 4090 at 4K it's much more reasonable to expect a 120 hertz a 4k monitor to not go to waste and we actually saw issues with needing to frame cap to in order to not go above the 120 hertz Monitor and get screen tearing which brings me to the topic of dlss frame generation so as I explained in the video I have it available in two games right now Spider-Man and plaguetail Requiem both of which I am actively playing and I tried turning on frame generation for quite a a long time in both games and in both of them I ended up turning it off so in my limited experience with the games that I have that I actually play that are available with now my answer to is dlss3 worth it is no although I'm excited for the feature and I think there could end up being a places where it's worthwhile for me the biggest issue is when my game goes above my monitor's refresh rate I can't cap it and I get screen tearing and that's ugly and I don't like it in Spider-Man I was more had some more issues with the actual image quality of the frame generation itself but I thought it looked very good in plaguetail Requiem and I didn't have issues with the latency that it adds which it does add in single player games especially these are both games that I would play on a controller when actually using my mouse which I wouldn't normally do in those games I could feel a slight increase in the latency although I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't I don't play a lot of competitive first person shooters these days but you know in my youth I did play a lot of competitive CS go type games like that and so I can feel a slight increase to the like I don't know floatiness of the mouse movements they don't feel as precise um but I think for the vast majority of people the kind of frame rates you're playing at here it's not going to be that big of a deal and especially if you're playing a game with a controller I do not think you'd want to use it in a competitive esport title it gets you higher frame rates but the whole reason you want higher frame rates in an esport Esports title is for reduced latency and this does not give you that it gives you increased latency although I am happy that more games will add Nvidia reflex because they're forced to do it to support dlss frame generation so that's kind of an added side benefit of this technology for people who don't have the 40 series gpus and can support it so I'm going to keep my eye on this feature but overall in the few situations where the 4090 needs any frame rate benefit dlss quality of the old-fashioned variety gets the job done without the added latency and without the incompatibility with vsync so I'm just not in a situation where I see frame generation being useful to me maybe that would change in the future now at 1440p I think the 4090 is kind of Overkill I think the RTX 3080 still gives a very very good 1440p gaming experience and we saw that in incredibly demanding Ray tracing titles like cyberpunk know the 3080 can't completely max out the ray tracing settings but there's diminishing returns on the image quality you're getting getting for that anyway and you could go aggressive with dlss if you're willing to tolerate that trade-off if you really do want to Max it out the 4090 is certainly an incredibly future-proof 1440p card um I mean you know there's always limit to how future proof you can get but man does it crush 1440p the bigger issue you're gonna run into is whether or not your CPU can keep up because mine certainly couldn't in most of those games now it can keep up well enough that I could then just set my frame rate limit to something I'm happy with lock to it and the nice thing actually about the fact that the 4090 is so powerful that it can go to such high refresh rates that you might not even need that refresh rate is then when you do set a frame rate limit the GPU doesn't use that much power it's actually fairly power efficient and you can see actually in the screenshot I have Frozen behind me right now that the 4090 is actually using less power than the 3080 because it's CPU limited so it is actually pretty efficient at frames per watt it's just that it's able to draw a huge number of watts to go to a huge number of frames if you need it to if you limit it that that certainly helps out and like I said I'm having no problems running it on my uh 850 watt power supply so that just has and we saw that in not not every game does it actually try to draw 450 Watts but we saw my power supply certainly could deliver it with no issues um now you probably do on a good quality 850 watt power supply and also the 5950x CPU I'm using isn't as power hungry as like a 12 900k or a 13900k so if you're going to pair it with especially if you're going to overclock a CPU like that along with it I do think you might want to think about an even higher end power supply anyway guys the 4090 is absolutely ridiculously powerful although we did see some games where especially at 4K I mean there is room for more power if you just really don't want to turn down settings and you still want a high refresh rate but overall 4090 is enabling a high refresh rate 4K experience for really the first time ever whereas the 3080 12 gigabyte gives you a good 4K experience and a great 1440p experience with no trouble so if you're in the financial position where spending the crazy amounts of money that 40 90 costs is fine for you and you really want to go for 4K High refresh rate gaming I do think it is worth it if again that amount of money is not something irresponsible for you to spend on your hobby right whereas the 30 80 12 gigabyte I think does offer a very very good experience at a much much more wallet-friendly price so anyway I'm sure I'll be doing other comparisons more thoughts in the future especially as more gpus come out I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

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Id: Czbb7YZsrM8

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022