Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review

Introduction

Nvidia have made insane strides in recent generations. The GTX 1080 Ti was the default graphics card on almost every hardcore gaming rig for the longest time. The RTX 2080 Ti, as the name implies, brought hardware ray tracing to the world, as well is being ridiculously fast. The RTX 3080 Ti was yet another quantum step forward, but suffered from the same problem as all the Ampere cards in that it was as likely be found as an honest politician with the public’s interest at heart.

However, with the new Ada Lovelace cards appearing as the world got back up to speed means that hopefully these 4000 series cards will be easier to obtain. We’ve already seen that the RTX 4090 totally trounced all that has come before with its combination of architectural gains and pure raw horsepower. The RTX 4080 promises to be a trickier proposition though. It has to be cut down to achieve a price point – albeit relative to the price of the 4090 – so is it enough to merely best the RTX 3080 Ti or, like its sibling, is the architectural improvement enough to keep the RTX 4080 ahead of the Ampere cards. We can barely contain ourselves, particularly as we know this is the model that will not only sell to the enthusiast gamer crowd, but might see big sales amongst those who saved up for one of the major 3000 series cards but never managed to obtain one before news of the 4000 series broke.

Without further ado, let’s get down to business.

Technical Specifications

By default Nvidia follow the trend of all manufacturers in comparing the current model to one that came before. Certainly on paper the RTX 4080 doesn’t seem as powerful in raw numbers, but as we saw from the RTX 4090 the upgrade to 4th Gen Tensor Cores and 3rd Gen RT Cores is almost incalculably big. For those who want to compare the big RTX 4090 to this one, the numbers are (RTX 4090 first) 11 GPCs vs 7, 64 TPCs vs 38, 16384 CUDA vs 9728, 512 Tensor vs 304 and 128 RT vs 76.

Clearly the RTX 4080 is a lot less powerful than the RTX 4090, but is it enough to continue to best the RTX 3090 given how handsomely the latest flagship card bested that which came before? That’s what we’re here to discover.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review  
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review Â