Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review

Conclusion

If the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition was an easy card to summarise – the most powerful card on the planet by a fair margin – then the RTX 4080 Founders Edition does nothing to take the gloss off this product launch.

Any time you get a new flagship product it’s easy for it to be the biggest and best. Heck we doubt it would’ve been launched if it didn’t crush that which has come before. As you move down the range though there will always be a crossover where the older generation and the new one meet. There are only so many CUDA Cores, Tensor Cores and RT Cores you can remove before they stop being effective after all. However, whilst on paper the Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition might have fewer of those cores than the RTX 3080 Ti that Nvidia compare it to, the reality is that the generational upgrade has proven even more effective than we could have hoped.

As you saw throughout our testing the RTX 4080 FE doesn’t just best the RTX 3080 Ti, but handily beats out any of the Ampere cards we’d tested, even the ludicrous RTX 3090 Ti. In fact it runs the RTX 4090 so close that it’s difficult, unless you’re extremely flush with spare dough, to find a reason why you’d go with the bigger card. The RTX 4080 FE is just so incredibly capable in every title and every resolution.

We know that you can’t always lean on software fun and games to get good performance, but special mention has to go to the DLSS 3 and Nvidia’s Frame Generation technology. When you have a compatible title the difference turning on Frame Gen makes is staggering. There isn’t a noticeable difference in image quality, but the performance boost is significant. Admittedly it’s only available in a few games but if you look at F1 2022, for example, the 4K average jumps from 55 FPS to 103 by turning on DLSS 3, and if you then add Frame Gen to that it jumps up to 136. Nearly triple the performance for no real image degradation. Cyberpunk 2077’s numbers are 28 to 68 to 105! The latest iteration of DLSS really makes a difference.

All of which means that, like the RTX 4090 we reviewed recently, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition shows how ridiculously capable the Ada Lovelace architecture is at providing spectacular eye-candy at sky-high frame rates. If you’re even remotely interested in gaming it’s a no-brainer, especially as the Nvidia Reflex technology can give you the edge in the games that demand less of the graphics card but more of your twitch reflexes.

The only thing we didnt really like was the 4080 naming with the ‘Ti’ price tag. Youd think Nvidia would be going out of their way right now to make pricing LOOK better. I guess this is left overs from the 4080 12GB debarcle though. 

The Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition is another superb product from Nvidia if you focus on performance and ignore the fact its got the wrong name, second only to the RTX 4090 but not as wallet-shreddingly expensive, and wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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