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It’s safe to say that every once in a while, tech companies like NVIDIA made a breakthrough with their product line. While its Turing architecture was a solid introduction to its RTX technology, it is undeniably Ampere and by extension the new GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics card that is poised to put the company ahead of the competition once again.
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To that end, the GeForce RTX 3080 is one of the first cards to hit store shelves first and I have been given the privilege of playing the Founders Edition of the card. On that note, let me tell you directly: the card is, in every sense of the word, a powerhouse.
specs
Design
I’ll start by clearing up a point: while I may have been given the opportunity to review the RTX 3080 FE, the card itself will not be available in Malaysia, at least not officially. Of course, it goes without saying that when the RTX 3080 kicks in, so do the third-party custom chilled cards from its AiB partners.
A new cooling solution for a new generation of games.
Returning to the main attraction, the design of the RTX 3080 FE is clearly worth more than a brief glance. As mentioned in the first look at the card, NVIDIA took a radical approach to making this card beast. The new PCB is innovative and unique in its design, delivering 18-phase power delivery in an ultra-compact footprint that is also significantly smaller than previous generation graphics card boards.
Its radicalism doesn’t end there either, to no one’s surprise, with the PCB flanked by the attractive new heatsink and fans in their push-pull configuration which, when combined, produce a “dual axial flow” cooling solution. . That hardly breaks a sweat to keep the RTX 3080 FE cool, while continuously running the games and benchmarks I throw at it. More on that later.
As jaw-dropping as the RTX 3080 FE’s aesthetics are, we can’t ignore the hardware just below the heatsink, either. I mentioned the ultra-compact PCB and, until today, I was unable to provide further details and specifications of the card. You already know that the card is powered by 10GB of new GDDR6X graphics memory, courtesy of Micron, with the memory running at 19Gbps. Now I can also tell you the base and boost clocks of the cards, which are 1440MHz and 1710MHz, respectively.
The numbers and other features on this card are amazing, if not groundbreaking.
In comparison, those numbers are slightly lower than the RTX 2080 Super, but again, I want to point out that it is through a combination of multiple features and factors that makes the RTX 3080 FE truly innovative. First and last, NVIDIA has finally jumped on the PCIe 4.0 bandwagon with this card, and that opens the proverbial floodgates for card data rates.
In addition to the adoption of the new interface, it also has more Shader FLOP and RT Cores: 30 FLOP and 68 RT Cores of the second generation, specifically, 272 Tensor Cores that are in their second generation, and a whopping 8704 CUDA Cores.
To power up the beast that is the RTX 3080 FE, NVIDIA designed and installed an all-new 12-pin PCIe port on the card. Fear not, because as I mentioned in my previous article, this new port is only designed for Founders Edition and the third-party variant will still ship with the current 8-pin PCIe ports soldered on.
No NVLink SLI bridge for RTX 3080 FE.
Moving on, the RTX 3080 FE also lacks an NVLink SLI bridge, so there’s no hope of seeing this card running in a dual-GPU configuration. Note that despite its absence, the GA102 GPU architecture supports NVIDIA’s multi-GPU feature, but is based on the whitepaper and spec sheet on the official product pages. It’s an exclusive feature of the GeForce RTX 3090, for now.
As for the ports, we are looking at a single HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports. Unlike the RTX 20 series cards with Turing technology, there is no longer a USB-C port for DisplayLink.
testing bench
Benchmarks
Given that NVIDIA says its RTX 3080 FE is capable of up to twice the speed and performance of its previous generation GeForce RTX 2080 Super, that’s exactly what we’ll do: pit the RTX 3080 FE against the second most powerful brand. Turing-based consumer graphics card.
To test the cards, I will use the usual rate for benchmark tools and tests; The list includes UL’s 3DMark test suite, Unigine overlay, plus Bright Memory and Boundary benchmarks. For a comparison between the handling of the two RTX and DLSS cards combined. Sticking with the topic, I’ll just set the DLSS level to “Balanced” on both, as I think this will provide a fair performance read for them.
For games I’m running my usual list of games from Battlefield V (BFV), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (DXMD), DOOM Eternal, Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR), plus a new addition: 505 Games’ Control for both RTX and DLSS simulation. Lastly, I am testing the game on the three common screen resolutions: Full HD (1920 x 1080), WQHD (2560 x 1440) or 1440p and 4K (3840 x 2160). Oh, and before I forget, I’m also using the ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQ 4K Gaming Monitor to get the most out of the experience.
The card just smashes in 4K.
As you can see from the charts, the RTX 3080 FE leaves the RTX 2080 Super very cruelly in a cloud of dust, ahead of its predecessor in almost all synthetic benchmarks and real world applications. The same description of the level of the victory lap is also very clearly visible when it comes to games.
In the worst case, the performance of the RTX 3080 FE reaches a minimum of 16fps in the Overlay benchmark at 4K resolution and the Shader level is set to Extreme. What is and has been the most graphically resourceful environment for most of my benchmark. In fact, I’ve only included the scores in this benchmark with the Shaders set to High only, especially since the RTX 2080 Super was desperately struggling to maintain its composure at the same settings.
Of course, where the RTX 3080 FE really shines is through gaming, but more importantly, gaming in 4K resolution. On that note: yes, dear readers, as promised by NVIDIA, the card is more than capable of holding an average of 100fps in 4K, along with its graphics settings set to Ultra Nightmare.
However, in games like BFV, Control, and SotTR that come with RTX support, running these games with RTX turned on and at native 4K resolution undoubtedly puts a cost on the RTX 3080 FE. Surprisingly though, BFV is the only game on that list that manages to keep the frame rate above 60fps in 4K, but as for the other two, it struggled to even maintain an average of 40fps.
Fortunately, these games also feature NVIDIA’s DLSS technology, and when you flip that switch, the difference in performance is like the sun and the moon; All three games started to run and stay above and beyond the 60fps mark, with only one or two stutters in the game at random. Sure, the feature is basically zoom-in, but with DLSS 2.0 doing its magic, I can’t really find any flaws or differences in texture quality. Well, except for Control, maybe.
Temperature and power consumption
While the RTX 3080 FE shows some significant performance gains in both synthetic and real-world tests, that’s not even the card’s most impressive feat. What’s really mind-blowing is how the GPU temperature never seems to drift past 74 ° C, at full load and while playing games at 4K resolution. I know this is a huge exaggeration, but the way NVIDIA has managed to pull it off is an unprecedented feat, in and of itself. That said, I keep a relatively cool lab, with the ambient temperature typically kept below 20 ° C, and that may have contributed to this.
But while the RTX 3080 FE offers both performance and temperatures, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the card is also power-hungry. When idle, the card only consumes 15W. However, make it work at full capacity and that number increases to 320 W and stays there more or less for the duration of the program that is assigned to it.
conclusion
Just like NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture was an exponential improvement over Maxwell, it’s the same between Ampere and Turing. When he first arrived on the scene, Turing was, in a sense, revolutionary, as he gave the world its first look at RTX technology.
With Ampere, NVIDIA simply took that technology out of its infancy and increased the efficiency of all relevant parts, to make the GPU significantly more powerful in its delivery. One of the many end results of its action is this very card that I am holding, the GeForce RTX 3080 FE.
To that end, the GeForce RTX 3080 FE is, hands down, one of the most powerful NVIDIA cards I have ever tested and, as it stands, the most powerful card in my lab’s inventory. At least, until I get my hands on the GeForce RTX 3090.
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