Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders’ Edition is an engineering and performance accomplishment. As the new monarch of 4K gaming and the next great stride in GPU innovation, it receives our Editors’ Choice. It was almost unavoidable, with a flurry of new software options fueled by tremendously powerful technology. The GeForce RTX 3080 is the next Ampere generation’s flagship graphics card. It offers the previous bearer of the title of “fastest graphics card” a good, sound-kicking.

Features and Chipset:

The card contains 46% more SMs (68) than the Turing 2080 and more than double the number of CUDA cores (from 2,944 to 8,704). This implies the SM is left to render the rest of the scene on its own. In addition to greater performance, the cards now include new capabilities that will benefit almost everyone who has an RTX card.

Nvidia chose an entirely new cooler design for the Founders Edition graphics card, which is far more practical than anything it’s ever done with a reference design previously. To make the rear end of the card all heatsink, the business employed a shorter, multi-layered PCB. They were able to put a fan on the ceiling by doing so.

Specification:

In comparison to what we expected, the GA102 has twice as many CUDA cores, and significantly more than the equivalent Turing generation. However, because of the new architecture’s design, there are fewer AI-driving Tensor Cores. The board power rating of the Founders Edition is 320W, with peaks of 368W in demanding games. If you have a Core i9 10900K processor, you’ll probably need at least 850W.

Design:

The new appearance of Nvidia The graphics cards in the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition are more powerful than ever before. Both the 3080 and 3090 Founders Edition cards require 750W from the power supply. Although Ampere is more efficient than Turing, it’s evident that Nvidia pushed the envelope a little too far here. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE, Nvidia’s latest flagship card, has a dual-axial design that distributes some of the cooling load to the rest of your system. The card’s extensively integrated design also appears to be difficult to deconstruct.

The card is “unique in both its design and assembly,” just like the previous-gen Founders Edition designs. The GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition has a 12-pin power connector that is about the same size as a single 8-pin connector. According to Nvidia, the design has been submitted for standardization, so it may appear on competing cards in the future. The provided adapter does not appear to be of high quality.

Benchmarks and Performance:

The RTX 3080 is an incredible beast of a gaming GPU, capable of delivering frame rates that make the RTX 2080 Ti look like a low-end graphics card. When the going gets difficult, I’ve noticed frame rate increases of between 25% and 43% over the RTX2080 Ti. Only Shadow of the Tomb Raider gives such a scenario in my testing, but doubling the Super’s 4K frame rates is incredibly outstanding.

With ray tracing set to Ultra, you get 38 percent and 46 percent greater perf/W in titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus, respectively. Even with the 0dB fan option, it’s not too noisy, and the fans don’t start spinning until temperatures reach the mid-sixties.

Gaming:

Even the most demanding AAA games, such as Control, maybe accelerate from under 10 frames per second to up to 57 frames per second with all settings maxed out with the GeForce RTX 3090. There aren’t many 8K display makers right now, and those that do aren’t exactly handing out 8K testing samples by the handful. Expect a barrage of frame-rate graphs and infographics chock-full of data from PC Labs’ tests.

Thermals and power Draw:

We’re using the standard FurMark and hours of gaming sessions for the thermal test to determine if there’s any change in load temperature and power usage. The RTX 3080 Ti has a little higher load temperature than the RTX 3090, which is expected given the RTX’s larger heatsink and cooling fans. In terms of power draw, both cards exhibit a 348-350W draw on both Furmark and gaming stress testing.

Pros: