NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition, 16GB GDDR6X, HDMI, 3x DP

Heute können wir endlich die NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition (FE) einschließlich aller technischen Details und der lang ersehnten Benchmarks vorstellen, denn die Spannungskurve war schon reichlich groß. Auch wenn NVIDIA die Karte eigentlich als Nachfolgerin der GeForce RTX 3080 sieht, ist es doch eine Kampfansage an die RTX 3090 und vor allem auch an die GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, denn preislich wird man wohl genau dort landen, wo das alte Spitzenmodell mal lag. Auch bei der GeForce RTX 4080 gibt es wieder richtig fette Kühler, denn ich schrieb ja schon in einem Artikel zur Herkunft der mega-großen Kühler für die RTX 4090, dass man die TBP erst im Nachhinein extrem eingkürzen konnte. Hier sind die Aufbauten immerhin noch um 100 Watt überdimensioniert, denn die geplante TDP wurde von einstmals 420 Watt auf 320 Watt eingekürzt. Das macht natürlich umso neugieriger, vor allem was Temperaturen und Lautstärke betrifft.

Gute Leistung zum schlechten Preis. Die Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 basiert auf dem AD103-Chip und ist das Mainstream-Flaggschiff der neuen Ada-Architektur. Die RTX 4080 Founders Edition präsentiert sich als eine leistungsfähige 4K-Ultra-Gaming-GPU, besitzt hervorragende Wärme- und Geräuschcharakteristika und arbeitet überaus effizient. Der Preis von 1.469 Euro wirft jedoch Fragen auf, vor allem da auch die Konkurrenz schon in den Startlöchern steht.

Die Geforce RTX 4080 tritt in die großen Fußstapfen früherer 80er-Modelle: Sie ist bedeutend schneller und effizienter als das Topmodell der vorigen Generation, liefert neue Features und eine leise Kühlung. Ob bzw. für wen dieses Produkt den Preis von knapp 1.500 Euro wert ist, klärt PCGH im Test der Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080 Founders Edition.

Nachdem NVIDIA mit der GeForce RTX 4090 den Anfang gemacht hat, folgt heute die GeForce RTX 4080. Zum heutigen Tag schauen wir uns die Founders Edition an, in wenigen Tagen werden dann die ersten Custom-Modelle folgen. Wie sich die GeForce RTX 4080 gegenüber der Vor- und Vorvorgänger-Generation positioniert, ist sicherlich eine der spannenden Fragen, die wir heute versuchen zu beantworten. Den Blick in Richtung AMD können wir aber noch nicht vollumfänglich wagen, da die Radeon-RX-7000-Serie wohl erst Mitte Dezember folgend wird. Nun aber zum Test der GeForce RTX 4080.

With all of our testing out of the way and having taken a closer look at the card Nvidia’s RTX 4080, Founders Edition shows once again just how capable their new Ada architecture is capable. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition consistently came in second across our charts behind the RTX 4090 while having 40% fewer CUDA cores. This shows just how ludicrous the RTX 4090 is, but it is also impressive that with that 40% drop the performance was only 25% less. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition has the same cooler design as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition which does mean that it has the same huge card size, but this also translated to surprisingly good cooling performance. On top of that, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition was quiet, especially when under load. The Founders Edition all metal construction is there as always and I still think this is the best looking card design on the market.

So I think this is a record for the most comprehensive review of a graphics card that we’ve ever done and I’ll firstly apologise for the sheer length of it because I just kept adding to it as there’s so much to cover, so hopefully, it’s appreciated. I’ll try and keep this part short and sweet because I think the performance speaks for itself. The RTX 4080 is a beast, but the price I know just doesn’t sit right with most consumers who argue that it’s out of reach for the average gamer, but I want to make one thing clear. The 4080 and 4090 aren’t for the average gamer. They truly are next-level performance and that’s so clear to see when you look at the lower-resolution performance which just ends up bottlenecked by the current lineup of CPUs. Sure, we could have used the 5800X3D which would have seen huge performance gains in some titles, but the 12900K that we used, still beats it in other titles. I guess, now, more than ever, we need next-level CPUs in terms of 3D cache, on the Ryzen 7000 series. Until then, DLSS 3 really does make up the difference and frankly shocked me in certain titles, like Cyberpunk and Spider-Man and from a first glance, looks absolutely gorgeous, but as I said, I do want to drill down further into that in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

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.

Be it for gaming or content creation work, the RTX 4080 is what I consider the alternative to the RTX 4090 if the price is right because it’s also a great GPU from NVIDIA this time around. Unlike the RTX 4090, CPU bottleneck is very minimal throughout our tests, I’d say it’s a lot more reasonable option if you’re not going all-in with the latest-gen Intel Core-i9 or AMD Ryzen 9.

Now that we’ve seen the top two Ada-based GPUs in NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the line-up and NVIDIA’s potential path forward. First and foremost, the GeForce RTX 4080 is a strong performer relatively to previous-gen cards. Although it has less memory bandwidth, the RTX 4080’s updated, more efficient architecture, higher clocks, and larger caches and memory capacity allowed it to clearly outperform both the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and the previous flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. There is a big performance gap between the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, however. The smaller AD103 GPU, while fast and efficient, simply can’t hang with the beefy AD102 powering the RTX 4090.

Overall, it’s not really too difficult to conclude on a GPU like the RTX 4080. At $1,199, it’s not inexpensive, but if you use it in the right workloads, the performance leaps over the previous generation can be huge. The fact that the current-gen $1,199 GPU is much faster overall than the last-gen $1,499 RTX 3090 is a good sign, although we still wish that given the top-end performance gap, the RTX 4080 had even more attractive pricing – but if you were to talk to the company over a marketplace website, it’d surely say, “No bartering. I know what I have.”

I have no hesitation in recommending the RTX 4080 as a product, as a great piece of technology, but the current pricing makes little sense with the Founders Edition reviewed here. Some of the third party cards advertised in the UK actually seem to have prices closer to the RTX 4090 Founders model, which is shocking. In terms of the RTX 4080 FE reviewed here, I love the form factor, I love the near-silent operation and the actual experience of playing games on a 4K 120Hz TV with G-Sync is excellent - it may not have quite the wow factor of the RTX 4090, but it's still highly impressive. However, the price premium is difficult to justify with pressure coming from so many different directions: from legacy GA102 Ampere cards, from the upcoming AMD RX 7900 products - and astonishingly, even from the RTX 4090.

From a hardware and performance point of view, the GeForce RTX 4080 is downright fantastic. However, we live in challenging times; with a war close to the EU border and soaring energy prices, life has become much more challenging and expensive. That does make products like those shown today harder to support; then again, we can't blame NVIDIA for the state of the world in 2022. We hope to see affordable low-energy products sooner rather than later from NVIDIA. As a piece of hardware all by itself, we can only applaud the 4080. The ADA GPU architecture can perform skillfully and excellently. A good chunk of extra shader cores brings in nearly 1.5x raw shader performance and even better Raytracing and Tensor core performance. Underlying technologies like Shader Execution Reordering (SER) and DLSS 3.0 make the new product and Series 4000 shine. The GeForce RTX 4080 offers staggering numbers. Starting at $1199, however, it's very expensive. If you have the wallet leniency and play games in Ultra HD or, at the very least, start at a monitor resolution of 2560x1440, we can't argue that it'll be a great addition towards any enthusiast-class gaming rig. Take Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 combined with DLSS 3.0, you can fly at 100+ FPS in the highest resolutions. Cyberpunk at UHD with raytracing and DLSS3 quickly passes 100 FPS. This purebred Ultra HD card shines in that area, whether shading (regularly rendered games) or hybrid ray-tracing + DLSS3 is used. Compared to the mighty 4090, this still is a more economical product series offering enormous performance. In closing, the RTX 4080 impresses and will keep you happy for years to come, but at a high cost and despite excellent perf per watt, with relatively high energy consumption levels. Never has built a new game PC been this expensive, but never have things been this fast.

In this review we've tested NVIDIA's new DLSS 3 frame-generation capability, and I have to say I'm impressed. At first I was highly sceptical and thought it would be like the soap opera interpolation effect on TVs, but no, it works REALLY well. The algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult, because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. I also feel like we're only seeing the beginning of this technology, and there will be numerous improvements in the future. Adoption rates should be good, because implementing DLSS 3 frame generation is very easy if you already have DLSS 2 support in your game. Another interesting NVIDIA Tech is "Reflex," which reduces the total gaming latency, so you see things earlier on your screen and can react faster, to get more kills or survive for longer.