NVIDIA released the RTX 40 series GPU based on the Ada Lovelace architecture on September 20, with the third-generation RT Cores and the fourth-generation Tensor Cores, and also brought the new DLSS 3 black technology, and the gaming experience has been greatly improved compared to the previous generation. The RTX 4090 has been on sale for a while now, and now we finally welcome the RTX 4080. As the current sub-flagship of the RTX 40 series, the RTX 4080 also has a series of new features of the Ada Lovelace architecture, including DLSS 3, which can greatly improve the visual effects of the game and the frame rate of , and the price is relatively dessert. As the core partner of NVIDIA, Asus ROG also launched the RTX 4080 graphics card product at the first time. Among them, the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 OC Edition 16GB is a representative of the super public version of luxury materials. Let’s learn more about this product.
Ada Lovelace architecture has been fully improved, and RTX 4080 positioned as a dessert flagship
In the previous RTX 4090 first review, we have conducted a very comprehensive analysis of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture (friends who need to know can check the articles on our official account). Here we will briefly review the technological innovations of the RTX 40 series GPUs. The blockbuster black technology DLSS 3 exclusively supported by the
RTX 40 series realizes optical multi-frame generation through optical flow accelerator, achieving a huge increase in game frame rate
●The newly designed streaming multi-processor has a coloring capability of up to 83 TFLOPS, and its throughput is twice as high as the previous generation of products.
●The third generation RT Cores has an effective ray tracing computing power of 191 TFLOPS, which is 2.8 times that of the previous generation of products.
●The fourth generation of Tensor Cores has a new FP8 engine, with tensor processing performance up to 1.32 PFlops, 5 times higher than the previous generation.
●Supports shader execution reordering (SER), improving execution efficiency by rescheduling the shader load instantly. SER can bring up to 3x performance improvements to ray tracing, and overall gaming performance can be up to 25%.
●Add Ada optical flow accelerator brings a 2x performance improvement, allowing DLSS 3 to predict motion changes between frames in a scene, allowing neural network to improve frame rate while maintaining image quality.
●Architecture has been greatly improved, using TSMC to customize the 4N process, which is specially optimized for GPUs, achieving up to 2 times the energy efficiency leap.
●12GB video memory and above models provide dual NVIDIA encoder (NVENC), which can shorten the video export time by up to half and provides hardware encoding support for AV1.
So what are the specifications of RTX 4080 as the sub-flagship of the RTX 40 series? The RTX 4080 uses AD103 chip, which has some cuts compared to the AD102 of the RTX 4090. It has 9728 CUDA cores, which can provide 49 Shader-TFLOPS traditional raster rendering capabilities; 304 fourth-generation Tensor Cores provide 780 Tensor-TFLOPS computing performance for AI processing and DLSS; 76 third-generation RT Cores have 113 RT-TFLOPS computing performance, which provides strong power for the next-generation ray tracing; it is equipped with 256` bit/16 GB Micron GDDR6X graphics memory. According to official data, the RTX 4080 can perform up to 2 times that of the RTX 3080 Ti, while the power consumption is reduced by nearly 10%. Of course, the RTX 4080 also has several technologies in the Ada Lovelace architecture, including shader execution reordering (SER), third-generation RT Cores, and DLSS 3.
In addition, careful players may notice that the number of RT Cores/Tensor Cores/TUs of RTX 4080 is even smaller than that of RTX 3080 Ti, and the memory bit width is lower. So how does it achieve higher performance? As mentioned earlier, the SM unit of the RTX 4080 has been further optimized and supports SER technology. At the same time, RT Cores and Tensor Cores are one generation higher, so the efficiency is naturally incomparable. In addition, the GPU's second-level cache is nearly 10 times higher than the RTX 3080 Ti, and the core frequency is more than 50%. Based on these factors, the final performance of RTX 4080 is actually far exceeding that of the RTX 3080 Ti. In terms of TGP, the RTX 4080 is set to 320 W, which is 30 W lower than the RTX 3080 Ti, which shows that its advanced process does bring extremely high energy efficiency ratio.
Next, let’s take a look at the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 OC Edition 16GB graphics card.
E-sports equipment supported by the power of Cyber
If the TUF series has always been on the "hard-minded military rules", then this generation of ROG Strix graphics cards can be called "Cyber flagship". I believe that players who have seen our previous RTX first reviews must be impressed by its explosive style, and the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC almost completely replicates the ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC in appearance. It is more square than the previous generation of products, with smooth corners. Even though the body shape is still exaggerated, it does not look dull and bloated. The appearance design of the
graphics card has added a large number of elements of the cyberpunk worldview. The surface adopts a distinctive red and blue gradient color scheme. There is a totemized ROG faith logo in the upper left corner of the graphics card. It is combined with the "Eye of Players" with neon effect on , while showing the power of e-sports belief, it is also young enough and full of functional sense. The new generation of Aura Sync divine light synchronization faith lighting effect is designed at the tail and side logo. The ring light strip at the tail is very distinctive. After turning on the divine light synchronization lighting effect, the gorgeous neon colors make the overall sense of the graphics card richer, showing a charming cyber atmosphere.
In order to cope with the heating of RTX 4080, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC, like the RTX 4090, adopts a brand new heat dissipation module design, equipped with a fully enclosed heat dissipation panel, backplate and die-cast metal frame, and uses ADC 10 high-hardness aluminum alloy material with better mechanical properties, greatly enhancing the graphics card's ability to withstand deformation. The 3.5-slot large-scale heat dissipation system can provide larger heat dissipation space and more heat dissipation fins . The internal design is heat-sensing plate direct touch and heat pipe embedded, with four 8mm and three 6mm heat pipes built-in. According to official information, the temperature can be reduced by another 5℃ when it withstands a heat load of 500W.
comes with graphics card holder that can be "transformed" into a screwdriver
The newly upgraded Axial-tech 7 fan blade dual ball axial flow fan can provide 23.8% airflow and 19.3% air pressure than the previous generation fan of ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090, and the overall heat dissipation performance is stronger. It has an intermediate fan reversal design, which effectively reduces spoiler and improves the utilization rate of heat dissipation air flow. The fan supports 0dB technology and can completely stop when the GPU core temperature is low, reducing noise at low load. The rear of the graphics card also has two PWM FanConnect II interfaces, and players can connect fans according to their needs to improve overall cooling performance. The power supply part of
, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC adopts a 18+3 super alloy digital power supply solution, the GPU part uses an MP2888A control chip + TDA21570 (70A) MOSFET, and the video memory part uses a UP9529QQKF + SIC6389 (50A) power supply solution. In addition, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC also uses Asus fully automated process technology, which can effectively eliminate human errors in production, make the PCB backplane smoother and bring higher durability. The auxiliary power supply part uses a single 16pin interface, and the graphics card comes with a 3×8Pin adapter cable, which is convenient for old power users to use. The ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC is equipped with a high-strength stainless steel baffle, and provides 3 DP 1.4 interfaces and 2 HDMI 2.1 interfaces, meeting the needs of players to form multi-display systems and 8K resolution and high refresh rate monitors without any problems. In terms of
specifications, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC graphics card uses RTX 4080 core, has 9728 CUDA cores, supports PCIe4.0, has a video memory of 16GB GDDR6X, and a frequency of 22.4Gbps. Thanks to solid materials and powerful radiator, the default frequency of the graphics card reaches 2625Mhz and the acceleration frequency is 2655MHz, which is much higher than that of the public version (the public version is 2510MHz).
performance release is too violent! ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC far exceeds RTX 3080Ti
Test platform
Graphics card: ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 OC Edition 16GB
Processor: Intel Core i9 13900K
Motherboard: ROG MAXIMUS Z790 HERO
Memory: Kingston FURY Renegade RGB 32GB DDR5
Hard disk: Kingston KC3000 2TB
Power supply: ROG THOR 1200W Platinum II
operating system: In the Windows 11 Professional Edition
test, we unlocked the processor power consumption wall and turned on the Resize BAR option in the BIOS.The memory is selected for XMP DDR5 6000 mode, and the frequency division is set to automatic. In addition, the RTX 3080 Ti is also selected to compare with the RTX 4080. In the benchmark performance testing section, except for FireStrike EXTREME, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC is about 49% ahead of the RTX 3080 Ti in other DX11 and DX12 projects. The ray tracing project DXR scored 85.13fps, 56% higher than the RTX 3080Ti, and a 45% lead in Port Royal. In this test, we added the latest DLSS 3 functional test. In the DLSS 2K resolution test, the RTX 4080 is 45% higher than the RTX 3080Ti with DLSS turned on, and is more than twice the RTX 3080T in the DLSS 3 4K resolution test. What is more surprising is that the performance of the RTX 4080 in the DLSS 3 test project was 4.2 times higher than that when DLSS was turned off. The benchmark performance of RTX 4080 is approximately 70%~77% of that of RTX 4090, which is relatively consistent with its chip size.
Next we enter the actual game test, first of all, the traditional rasterized game. At 2K resolution, the average frame rate of the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC is about 35% higher than that of the RTX 3080 Ti. With the resolution reaching 4K, the lead rate has reached 36.5%, and the increase in some games is as high as 52%. For games like "Control" and "Watch Dogs: Legion", the RTX 4080 can also run a smooth frame rate of nearly 90fps in 4K, which shows that its performance is indeed very powerful. In the performance test of
ray tracing game, the leading advantage of RTX 4080 continues to expand, and at 2K resolution, it maintains the advantage of 21%~52%, with an average increase of 40%. In 4K ray tracing, we have joined the DLSS project. We can see that at native 4K resolution, the average increase of RTX 4080 is 42%. After turning on DLSS, the RTX 4080 can keep all tested game masterpieces very smooth in the 4K extreme ray tracing settings. Among the 9 games that support DLSS, the frame rates of 5 games exceed 100fps after turning on DLSS.
In general, RTX 4080 has excellent performance in both raster games and ray tracing games, with an average performance of more than 40% ahead of RTX 3080 Ti. In the ray tracing game with the highest image quality, with the support of DLSS, mainstream 3A masterpieces can achieve smooth frame rates of 100fps or even higher, which can be said to have completely "conquered" 4K games. It can be seen that with the advanced Ada Lovelace architecture, extremely high frequency and third-generation RT Cores, the RTX 4080 provides ray tracing computing efficiency far exceeding the previous generation. At the same time, relying on the fourth-generation Tensor Cores, it brings better DLSS performance, making it a new generation of 4K ray tracing gaming weapon.
DLSS 3 is a key technology of the RTX 40 series. The newly added optical flow accelerator combined with DLSS 3 technology can greatly improve frame rate and reduce frame delay. After the release of the RTX 40 series, many DLSS 3 games have also arrived one after another. Currently, 10 DLSS 3 games have been released, including "Plague Legend: Requiem", "Memory of Light: Infinity", "Destroy All Humanity 2: Redetection", "Shadow Torch City", "F1 2022", "Against the Cold", "Life and Death", "Marvel Spider-Man: Remake", "Microsoft Flying Simulation" and "Super Humanity". In addition, "WRC Generations", "Need for Speed: Unruly" and "Warhammer 40K: Dark Tide" will be released soon after the launch of the RTX 4080. This time we selected several of them for testing.
From the above test results, we can see that the frame rate of RTX 4080 has greatly improved after turning on DLSS 3. With the support of DLSS 3, the frame rate of most games can reach more than 2 times the native resolution. Compared with the RTX 3080 Ti with DLSS 2 performance mode, the frame rate can generally be increased by 50% to 90%. For example, using the 4K super ray tracing preset "Cyberpunk 2077", after turning on the DLSS 3 performance mode, the frame rate directly increased from 31fps to 114fps, which was nearly doubled compared to the RTX 3080 Ti. In contrast, the benefits brought by DLSS 3 technology to Microsoft Flight Simulation are more obvious. After the game turns on the DLSS 3 performance mode, it can reach 172fps, which is equivalent to increasing the frame rate by 69% on the basis of DLSS 2, achieving a 4K e-sports-level frame rate.
DLSS 3's optical multi-frame generation achieves higher game frame rates and effectively reduces latency through Reflex. In all tested games, when DLSS 3 is turned on, the PCL delay is much lower than the 4K native settings.Therefore, if you use an RTX 40 series graphics card to play games that support DLSS 3, we highly recommend turning on DLSS 3 to get a silky and smooth gaming experience with richer picture details, higher frame rates and lower control latency. In terms of image quality of
DLSS 3, we can see from the screenshot of "Cyberpunk 2077", even the performance mode of DLSS 3 is almost no different from the original, and the quality mode is completely unmatched. Players can fully feel at ease to turn on DLSS 3, while enjoying exquisite graphics and smooth frame rates.
RTX 4080 has 16GB GDDR6X super large video memory, and also has dual video encoder . In addition to games, it is naturally a very excellent productivity tool. From the test results, we can see that compared with the RTX 3080 Ti, the RTX 4080 has more than 40% performance improvements in most rendering test projects. With the support of dual encoder, the video transcoding performance of RTX 4080 is even more amazing. The 4K transcoding speed is more than 1 times faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, and the processing of 8K video is 76% faster. The RTX 3080 Ti does not carry the corresponding encoder, so it does not support AV1 hardware encoding. In the Da Vinci MagicMask Magic Mask function that uses graphics card AI calculation, the efficiency improvement of RTX 4080 has increased by nearly 65%, and the average performance has reached about 73% of the RTX 4090. In addition, we found that the 4K transcoding speed of RTX 4080 OC is consistent with the RTX 4090, and the gap between the RTX 4090 in the AV1 transcoding test project is also very small, both within 2%. If it is for editing purposes, the cost-effectiveness of RTX 4080 is quite good.
power consumption temperature and overclocking test
RTX 40 series adopts the TSMC 4N manufacturing process, and the frequency and energy efficiency are greatly improved compared with the previous generation. Of course, this also puts huge pressure on the cooling system of the graphics card. However, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC's powerful 7 heat pipe and 3-fan 3.5-slot radiator can easily suppress the RTX 4080, unlocking performance potential. In an environment with room temperature of 26℃, use Furmark to test the test machine continuously for 30 minutes. The default test machine power can reach 353W, and the GPU temperature is up to 65℃, and the heat dissipation performance is relatively good.
ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC default acceleration frequency is 2655MHz, and the highest frequency in the game can be measured up to 2865MHz. In addition, we also performed a simple overclocking . Without adjusting the voltage, the frequency of the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC can easily reach 3090MHz. At this time, the TGP is also close to 350W, and the working temperature has only increased slightly. With the high-spec power supply design and cooling system, technical players have a chance to impact higher frequencies.
Summary: 4K ray tracing ultimate weapon, a powerful choice for enthusiastic gamers
ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC is equipped with the new RTX 4080 GPU, the third-generation RT Cores and the fourth-generation Tensor Cores have brought stronger ray tracing performance to next-generation games and applications. The newly added optical flow accelerator allows the generation of AI frames of DLSS3 technology to be realized. As the sub-flagship of the RTX 40 series, the RTX 4080 can easily achieve high-frame and ultimate ray tracing games at 4K resolution with the support of DLSS, and the frame rate increase in games that support DLSS 3 is even more amazing. In addition, the RTX 4080 with 16GB of large video memory also has a huge performance increase compared to the RTX 3080 Ti in terms of 3D rendering output and video editing, especially the video encoding performance has even doubled.
In the super public version of RTX 4080, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC not only has luxurious materials and powerful cooling design, but also has good overclocking potential. For enthusiastic players who pursue the ultimate gaming experience and designer users who pursue efficiency, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC is a powerful choice worthy of priority.
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