[Hardware] Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review: A Huge Generational Leap in Performance

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review: A Huge Generational Leap in Performance
The GeForce RTX 3080 delivers big gains over Turing and the RTX 2080 Ti, but at a lower price.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is here, claiming the top spot on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and ranking as the best graphics card currently available — provided you're after performance first, with price and power being lesser concerns. After months of waiting, we finally have independent benchmarks and testing data. Nvidia has thrown down the gauntlet, clearly challenging AMD's Big Navi to try and match or beat what the Ampere architecture brings to the table.

We're going to hold off on a final verdict for now, as we have other third-party RTX 3080 cards to review, which will begin as soon as tomorrow. That's good news, as it means customers won't be limited to Nvidia's Founders Edition for the first month or so like we were with the RTX 20-series launch. Another piece of good news is that there's no Founders Edition 'tax' this time: The RTX 3080 FE costs $699, direct from Nvidia, and that's the base price of RTX 3080 cards for the time being. The bad news is that we fully expect supply to be insufficient to keep up with what we expect to be exceptionally high demand.

The bottom line, if you don't mind spoilers, is that the RTX 3080 FE is 33% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, on average. Or, if you prefer other points of comparison, it's 57% faster than the RTX 2080 Super, 69% faster than the RTX 2080 FE — heck, it's even 26% faster than the Titan RTX!

But there's a catch: We measured all of those 'percent faster' results across our test suite running at 4K ultra settings. The lead narrows if you drop down to 1440p, and it decreases even more at 1080p. It's still 42% faster than a 2080 FE at 1080p ultra, but this is very much a card made for higher resolutions. Also, you might need a faster CPU to get the full 3080 experience — check out our companion GeForce RTX 3080 CPU Scaling article for the full details.

We have a separate article going deep into the Ampere architecture that powers the GeForce RTX 3080 and other related GPUs. If you want the full rundown of everything that's changed compared to the Turing architecture, we recommend starting there. But here's the highlight reel of the most important changes:

The GA102 is the first GPU from Nvidia to drop into the single digits on lithography, using Samsung's 8N process. The general consensus is that TSMC's N7 node is 'better' overall, but it also costs more and is currently in very high demand — including from Nvidia's own A100. Could the consumer Ampere GPUs have been even better with 7nm? Perhaps. But they might have cost more, only been available in limited quantities, or maybe they would have been delayed a few more months. Regardless, GA102 is still a big and powerful chip, boasting 28.3 billion transistors packed into a 628.4mm square die. If you're wondering, that's 52% more transistors than the TU102 chip used in RTX 2080 Ti, but in a 17% smaller area.

Ampere ends up as a split architecture, with the GA100 taking on data center ambitions while the GA102 and other consumer chips have significant differences. The GA100 focuses far more on FP64 performance for scientific workloads, as well as doubling down on deep learning hardware. Meanwhile, the GA102 drops most of the FP64 functionality and instead includes ray tracing hardware, plus some other architectural enhancements. Let's take a closer look at the Ampere SM found in the GA102 and GA104.