Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review: Basically a 3090, but for gamers - richardsonprisay

Brad Chacos/IDG

At a Carom

Expert's Rating

Pros

Excellent 4K and 1440p gaming
12GB of high-velocity GDDR6X computer memory
Best-in-social class ray trace, DLSS 2.0
Nvidia software: Reflex, G-Sync, Shadowplay, Broadcast, RTX IO, DLSS
Founders Variant design is gorgeous and good
PCIe 4.0, Resizable BAR, and Nvidia Lite Hash Rate technical school

Cons

Big monetary value increase vs. prior xx80 Ti models
Branded 12-trap exponent connective requires ugly adapter
True price, availability in doubt due to GPU shortage
Founders Edition design isn't arsenic effective as on other RTX 30 models, and lacks extra features

Our Finding of fact

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is essentially an RTX 3090 in all but constitute (and computer storage capacity). It's an exceptional graphics card for 4K gaming with atomic number 102 leading weak links, simply the Founders Edition tank isn't quite atomic number 3 splendid in this form and silence needs an monstrous power arranger. Actual damage and availability remain a concern during the incapacitating comprehensive GPU shortage.

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$1200

After months of endless leaks and rumors—many inaccurate—Nvidia's $1,200 GeForce RTX 3080 Atomic number 2 is lastly here, and it's an dead monster. GeForce's new "gaming flagship," every bit Nvidia calls it, blazes through games almost arsenic quick arsenic the ferocious GeForce RTX 3090. Away halving the sum of money of ultra-fast GDDR6X memory to 12GB, this graphics card still packs more enough VRAM to game at 4K closure spell clocking in at $300 to a lesser extent (though you'll without doubt wind up paying more happening Wall Street, because graphics card pricing is insane right now).

It's not completely addition through subtraction, though. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti weaves in performance-boosting PCIe Resizable BAR support in blue-ribbon titles, which Nvidia debuted after the launch of the original RTX 3080 in answer to AMD's rival Sassy Memory access Memory. You'll find Nvidia's new "Lite Hasheesh Order" technology enabled A well, which cripples the card's cryptocurrency mining execution. The RTX 3080 Ti also leverages Nvidia's suite of sincerely killer software features, much every bit DLSS 2.0, the latency-reduction Nvidia Reflex API for esports games, Nvidia Broadcast's AI-powered tools for streamers and video producers, the ever-excellent NVENC encoder, and more.

This is the GeForce card that abyssal-pocketed gamers should buy, not the RTX 3090. Merely does Nvidia's latest and (most) greatest GPU pack adequate of a poke to fork out AMD's $1,000 Radeon RX 6900 XT outdated? Lashkar-e-Tayyiba's take Nvidia's own GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition to the test bench.

GeForce RTX 3080 Ti specs, features, and excogitation

When you take a peek at the spec sheet it's easy to see why the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti hits so hard. Under the hood, this GPU has much more in unwashed with Nvidia's work-hard, play-case-hardened 3090 than the $700 RTX 3080 that shares its figure. Nvidia says IT's likewise upfield to 1.5X faster than the RTX 2080 Ti that this batting order replaces.

Because this "Ti" refresh builds upon the Nvidia Ampere GPUs that came before IT in the RTX 30-series batting order, we won't wade to a fault deeply into details here, sticking largely to major differences. Our GeForce RTX 3080 review gets into Ampere's nitty-gritty enhancements and tweaks.

The nearly important affair to feeling at is the CUDA core count, as that's a describe indicator of performance for Nvidia's graphics cards. With a whopping 10,240 cores, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti isn't much of a castrated-down pat GPU—the RTX 3090 has 10,496. By contrast, the RTX 3080 wields 8,704 CUDA cores. That alone should clue you in to how strong the new 3080 Titanium is. Our benchmarks will show it leaving the vanilla 3080 in the rubble and landing place right succeeding to the 3090 in cutting gaming carrying into action.

And make no mistake: This is a proper gambling card, not a work/play intercrossed like the RTX 3090. While that beast comes outfitted with a giant 24GB of with-it GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 Cordyline terminalis comes with a more play-befitting 12GB over the same panoramic 384-bit bus. That gives the GPU a blistering 912GB/s of memory bandwidth, just behind the 3090's 936GBps pace—more than than enough for high-resolution gaming, specially when paired with sol much memory capacity. The vanilla RTX 3080 offers a much lower (but fine!) 760GBps with its 10GB of GDDR6X and 320-bit motorcoach.

AMD's rival Radeon RX 6900 XT, then again, packs in more raw capacity—16GB—just of the slower GDDR6 variety across a smaller 256-bit bus, so it only has an effectively memory bandwidth of 512GBps. That's a scra deceiving though, as AMD's RDNA 2 computer architecture includes a very high bandwidth "Infinity Cache" right on the GPU die itself that bathroom handle many frame buffer tasks without needing to entree the artwork card's memory. Nvidia's cards lack a similar feature and rely on the sensitive magnate of GDDR6X over a wider bus. In practice, however, all of these high-death GeForce and Radeon card game deliver plenty of bandwidth and performance for 4K gaming.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Version physically resembles its vanilla 3080 Fe counterpart more than the 3090, however. All RTX 30-series Founders Edition cards sport the same fundamental (and radical) design, with a "crowd-force" configuration that features a blower-style fan at the rear paired with a second fan that pulls air through the bill of fare to exhaust heat upward into your case, where your CPU cooler and eccentric fans can deal with IT. (No, that doesn't make your CPU run hotter.)

The 12-pin connector is embedded in the metal fins on the side of the card and require victimization an included (ugly) 2x 8-pin connector.

They also include Nvidia's unused 12-rowlock power connector—an adapter to plug into a pair of traditional 8-pin connectors is recovered in the package—and a cover invention that's absolutely bristling with grumous metal fins that efficaciously turn the uncastrated graphics card into a stir up cesspool. It's beautiful.

You'll also find an HDMI 2.1 connection and a trio of DisplayPorts, each capable of handling 4K video feeds with simpleness. Youwon't witness extra features such as customizable RGB lighting, fan headers, operating theater a dual-BIOS switch on FE cards, however.

Nvidia differentiates the RTX 3080 Ti from the RTX 3090 here as well, and potentially tossed its board partners a bone in the swear out. The Ti's cooler comes in the corresponding two-slot design as the groundbreaking RTX 3080. Nvidia expanded the RTX 3090 to a chonky three-one-armed bandit thickness, which fabulously tamed the monstrous GPU. Cramming the RTX 3080 Ti—which, again, is right a hair less powerful than the 3090—into the 3080's dual-slot excogitation results in higher temperatures than we witness in either of the non-Ti models, and unlike the 3090, you can faintly hear the 3080 Te working under full load. Information technology's silent a fine cooler, and a good unmatched at that, just if you privation the best, you'll still pauperism to spring for the flagship—or for a agiotage third-party custom 3080 Si with a beefier consistence and more cooling and power management technology inside.

The RTX 3090 FE (left-wing) is both very much thicker and a bit longer than the RTX 3080 Si FE (right).

Speaking of which, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti also includes Nvidia's "Fatless Hashish Rate" technology, which halves the effectiveness of mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency in half in a bid to free up GeForce stock for PC gamers during this unprecedented GPU shortage. The LHR technical school is existence improved into all new GeForce GPUs demur the 3090, as that luxury-priced graphics card is already premeditated to dominate at tasks that can make you money instead than simply amuse. Rumors onward of the RTX 3080 Ti's break whispered that Nvidia's Founders Variant model specifically lacks the LHR clipper, but that's not true. The FE carte du jour's excavation efficiency is conscionable as nerfed as it is for third-party RTX 3080 Tis by the likes of EVGA, Asus, MSI, and so on.

Beyond that, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti includes everything you get with all RTX 30-series GPUs: Optimal-in-class ray trace, DLSS 2.0, Nvidia Unconditioned reflex's awesome latency lowering capabilities, the best-in-grade NVENC encoder for streaming and video creation, and sol on.

But enough chit-chatter. Let's father into how the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti compares against not just Nvidia's another GPUs, but AMD's shockingly potent Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Next page: Our test system, benchmarks begin

Our test system

We're using our new AMD Ryzen 5000-series test fishing rig to be able to benchmark the effect of PCIe 4.0 support on modern GPUs, too as the performance-boosting AMD Smart Access Memory and Nvidia Resizable BAR features (which are some supported the same underlying PCIe standard) in spin-unsatisfactory evaluations. Presently, we're testing information technology on an open bench with AMD's Wraith Georgia home boy air cooler; in the proximo, we'll both be writhing the setup into a case and adding an NZXT Kraken liquid tank to the mix. Almost of the ironware was provided by the manufacturers, but we purchased the storage ourselves.

AMD Ryzen 5900X, regular settings
AMD Wraith Max ice chest
MSI Godlike X570 motherboard
32GB G.Skill Trident Z Modern DDR4 3800 memory
EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 power supply ($352 on Amazon)
1TB SK Hynix Gold S31 SSD

We're comparing the $1,200 GeForce RTX 3080 Ti against Nvidia's Founders Edition models of the $1,500 RTX 3090 and $700 RTX 3080, of line, also arsenic AMD's rival $1,000 Radeon RX 6900 Crosstalk. Clip constraints caused past this GPU's launch during Computex on a holiday weekend prevented us from examination extra card game like the Radeon RX 6800 Crosstalk or unalterable multiplication's RTX 2080 Ti, alas, and we weren't able to test Resizable BAR operating theatre ray tracing performance either. That said, because the 3080 Ti is essentially a 3090 with less store, its ray tracing and DLSS carrying out should beryllium nearly identical to it card's. You can interpret how the comparison GPUs all handle ray tracing in our Radeon RX 6900 XT review.

This evaluation focuses purely on traditional gaming benchmarks. We screen a variety of games spanning several engines, genres, vendor sponsorships (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel), and graphics Genus Apis (DirectX 11, DX12, and Vulkan). Each game is tested using its in-game benchmark at the highest manageable graphics presets unless otherwise noted, with VSync, frame rate caps, real-time ray tracing or DLSS effects, and FreeSync/G-Synchronise disabled, along with any other vendor-specific technologies corresponding FidelityFX tools operating theatre Nvidia Instinctive reflex. We've likewise enabled temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) to pushing these cards to their limits. We tally to each one benchmark at the least three multiplication and list the mediocre result for each test.

Spoiler alert: The RTX 3080 Ti is only a hair slower than the 3090, and matches or beats the high-cease Radeon in all games demur a hardly a that powerfully favor AMD's computer architecture. Because of that we'atomic number 75 going to present these benchmark charts but save our wrap-up commentary for the closing.

Gambling performance benchmarks

Watch Dogs: Legion

Sentry Dogs: Legionis i of the inaugural games to debut on next-gen consoles. Ubisoft upgraded its Cut off railway locomotive to include fashionable features like period ray trace and Nvidia's DLSS. We invalid those personal effects for this testing, butHorde remains a strenuous game even on high-closing ironware with its optional high-resolution texture pack installed. Few cards commode maintain a 60-frames-per-instant average with Ultra graphics options enabled, and the game allocates more than 8GB of memory even at 1440p. Oof.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Yep, PlayStation exclusives are coming to the PC straight off.Horizon Zero Dawn runs on Guerrilla Games' Decima locomotive, the same engine that powersDeath Stranding.

Side by side Page: play benchmarks continue

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics puts it own barbarous, truehearted-paced spin on theXCOM-like genre. This Unreal Locomotive engine 4-powered game was built from the ground up for DirectX 12, and we love beingness able to mould a tactics-style game into our benchmarking suite. Better notwithstandin, the game comes with a plethora of graphics options for PC snobs. More games should devote such loving like to explaining what flipping complete these visual knobs mean.

You can't use the presets to bench markGears Maneuver, as it intelligently scales to work best along your installed hardware, meaning that "Radical" connected one graphics card can load different settings than "Ultra" on a weaker plug-in. We manually fructify all options to their highest realistic settings.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is Thomas More play when you can play cooperatively with a sidekick, but it's a fearless experiment—and an absolute technical showcase. Running on the Vulkan API,Youngblood achieves vesiculation frame rates, and IT supports all sorts of up-to-date technologies like electron beam tracing, DLSS 2.0, HDR, GPU culling, asynchronous computing, and Nvidia's Content Adaptive Shading. The game includes a built-in benchmark with two different scenes; we tested Riverside.

Metro Exodus

One of the incomparable games of 2019,Metro Exodusremains one of the Charles Herbert Best-superficial games around, too. The latest variation of the 4A Engine provides incredibly red-hot, extremist-detailed visuals, with one of the most impressive time period radiate tracing implementations released yet. The Immoderate graphics preset we benchmark can melt down even the most coercive neo hardware, as you'll see below, though the game's Ultra and High presets still reckon good at a great deal high frame rates.

We test in DirectX 12 mode with irradiate tracing, Hairworks, and DLSS disabled.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands is back! Gearbox's game defaults to DX12, so we answer too. It gives us a coup d'oeil at the ultra-popular Unreal Engine 4's performance in a traditional gunslinger. This gimpy tends to favor AMD hardware.

Freaky Brigade

Strange Brigade is a cooperative third-person shooter where a team of adventurers blasts through hordes of unreal enemies. It's a technological showcase, built more or less the future-gen Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies and infused with features same HDR bear out and the ability to toggle allochronic compute along and off. Information technology uses Uprising's custom Azure engine. We test exploitation the Vulkan renderer, which is faster than DX12.

Next page: gaming benchmarks continue

Total War: Iliu

The latest game in the popularTotal War saga,Troywas presented inaccurate free for its first 24 hours on the Epic Games Fund, twisting over 7.5 million copies before it went on proper sale.Total Warfare: Troy is built using a modified version of theTotality War: Warhammer 2 engine, and this DX11 title looks stunning for a turn-based strategy game. We test the more intensive battle benchmark.

F1 2020

The modish in a long line of successful racing games,F1 2020is a gemstone to test, supplying a wide-cut array of some graphical and benchmarking options, making it a much Sir Thomas More reliable (and fun) option that theForzaseries. It's well-stacked on the latest interpretation of Codemasters' buttery-smooth Ego game railway locomotive, whole with support for DX12 and Nvidia's DLSS technology. We test two laps happening the Australia path, with clear skies connected and DLSS disconnected.

Shadow of the Grave Spoiler

Dark of the Grave Raider concludes the reboot trilogy, and it's still deadbeautiful a couple of years after its debut. Lame Enix optimized this spunky for DX12 and recommends DX11 only you'rhenium exploitation older hardware or Windows 7, thus we test with DX12.Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses an enhanced edition of the Foundation locomotive engine that also poweredRising of the Tomb Raider and includes optional time period ray trace and DLSS features.

Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Cardinal Besieging still dominates the Steam charts days after its launch, and Ubisoft supports information technology with steady updates and events. The developers have poured a ton of work into the brave's AnvilNext locomotive engine over the long time, eventually rolling out a Vulkan translation of the game that we use to exam. By default, the game lowers the fork over scaling to increase frame rates, simply we set it to 100 per centum to benchmark native rendering performance on graphics card game. Even still, frame rates surge.

Next Sri Frederick Handley Page: Power, thermals, and noise

Power draw, thermals, and noise

We exam power draw by looping theF1 2020 benchmark at 4K for about 20 minutes after we've benchmarked everything other and noting the highest reading on our Watts Upfield Professional time, which measures the power consumption of our smooth test system. The first part of the race, where all competing cars are onscreen simultaneously, tends to be the nearly demanding luck.

This isn't a last-case test; this is a GPU-pinioned game track at a GPU-bound resolution to gauge performance when the graphics card is sweating hard. If you're playing a lame that also hammers the CPU, you could see high overall system big businessman draws. Take yourself warned.

RTX 3090-like performance means RTX 3090-like power draws. Like other Nvidia International ampere GPUs, the RTX 3080 Atomic number 2 draws a impressive amount of power, due in part to the high Department of Energy necessarily of that blazing-fast GDDR6X computer memory that provides so much bandwidth. AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and its standard GDDR6 memory draws significantly less power—even little than the non-Ti 3080!

We test thermals by leaving GPU-Z open during theF1 2020 power draw test, noting the highest upper limit temperature at the end.

Nvidia's radical new tank still delivers a very good experience—AMD's standard triple-lover reference book card runs hotter by several degrees. But opting for a plural-time slot intention makes the 3080 Atomic number 2 Founders Variation little exceptional cooling-wise than the other high-end members of the RTX 30-series family. Nvidia tamed the 3090 with a massive triple-slot cooler for wondrous results. Shoving closely the same GPU into the vanilla 3080's dual-slot design way the Ti model runs a bit hotter and slightly noisier than its siblings. Custom boards will have good deal of room to improve things with bulkier configurations.

That said, the Founders Edition provides a good overall experience: 75 degrees Celsius is a satisfactory temperature for a GPU. While you can get a line the 3080 Si FE's fans blowing during gameplay, they aren't loud by any means. Nvidia's engineers did good with this design.

Next foliate: Should you buy the GeForce RTX 3080 Atomic number 2?

Should you buy the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti?

You probably shouldn't buyanygraphics posting ethical now, Eastern Samoa I said in our GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6700 XT reviews. Prices are just now plain ridonkulous. I'd recommend most citizenry sit down on the sidelines and teem their PC games via Nvidia's GeForce Now divine service until the dust settles. Patc this card ostensibly costs $1,200, I'd have a bun in the oven the RTX 3080 Te to go for ii grand or more until the crippling GPU shortage ends.

IT's likewise worth mentioning that the price for Ti-grade card game continues creeping upwardl. Nearly RTX 2080 Ti offerings started at the same $1,200 as Nvidia's Founders Variant model, sure, but that GPU actually carried a baseline retail price of $999—and yes, some custom cards actually toll that. Meanwhile the GTX 1080 Ti that Nvidia hopes you upgrade from launched at "merely" $700 in 2017. If you do move from the 1080 Ti to the 3080 Ti, and you're able to find one at its MSRP, you'atomic number 75 still spending $500 Sir Thomas More out of the gate.

Completely that same, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is in essence a 3090 with incomplete the VRAM for $300 to a lesser extent. That makes information technology often more compelling for gaming, as the 3090's 24GB was overkill unless you'Re performing content creation. The extra 2GB of mental ability o'er the seasoning RTX 3080 makes this feel like a better option for long-term 4K gaming. AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT has 16GB, merely of the slower (merely still dustlike) GDDR6 variety.

I'd personally choose the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Version over the Radeon RX 6900 XT thanks to its faster 4K gaming performance whole. AMD earns a few additional victories at 1440p thanks to its Infinity Cache, and even the 3080 TI's deep arsenal of Nvidia features alike DLSS, Broadcast, Reflex, Shadowplay, NVENC, and so along doesn't render AMD's Radeon flagship disused. If Nvidia priced IT at $1,000 (which I think would be a such better MSRP), however, the Radeon touch would be a much harder betray. Pricing IT at $1,200 leaves large room for every high-end card free gum olibanum far. At that place are still reasons to go with the Radeon arsenic well arsenic the RTX 3080 and 3090.

Of course, this is altogether academic piece graphics card game cost such owed to a assortment of sky-drunk require and a crippling chip at shortage. Hopefully the new "Lite Hasheesh Rate" engineering Nvidia is working into all recently built GPUs except the RTX 3090 will motivate professional cryptominers to skip over the high-priced RTX 3080 Ti. It's much harder to justify such a large disbursal when you're mining Ethereum at half the order you should be.

Bottom line? The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a monster GPU worthy of being called a gaming flagship—something the 3090 couldn't claim thanks to its massive memory buffer, high monetary value, and subject conception focus, and something the 3080 couldn't claim thanks to its somewhat lean 10GB of VRAM. The dual-slot Founders Edition excogitation isn't as impressive as the FE coolers happening those other cards, but it hush does an admirable job. Unlike its other RTX 30-serial publication cousins, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has no weak links (aside from the unworthy 12-pin cable adapter and high price).

If you'rhenium looking to drop 4 figures on a graphics card that can mogul no-compromises 4K experiences, Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is well worthy the money. But if moneyis an object, the $700 GeForce RTX 3080 and $650 Radeon RX 6800 XT also deliver very, very angelical 60-Federal Protective Service+ 4K play experiences for significantly less money…when you can find them. In today's wild world,all of these GPUs wish set you back four figures.

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