Alright COME ON, Nvidia, I expected the 4090 to be a chonky boi because
it’s the flex card, but WHY is the 4080 THE SAME SIZE?! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!
Other than the size and the new connector that people are melting and Nvidia still
hasn’t commented on to my knowledge… I am pretty stoked on the RTX 4080. At $1200 it’s expensive,
but you’re getting basically the performance of a RTX 3090 in some of the worst cases,
and beating it in plenty of others. Not bad. I do worry about how the 12GB VRAM
model would have fared, though. Probably a good thing it was dropped to a lower tier.
I’m the Stream Professor - this review is all about using the RTX 4080 for work,
instead of play. Video editing, streaming, 3D rendering - and telling you about our sponsor.
This video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream. Get access to my own streaming site Nebula and watch
my exclusive documentary series premiering November 21, with the bundle linked below.
For photo editing, I keep testing this but generally you won’t see major worthwhile
gains by upgrading GPUs if you’re already on a high-tier card. Outside of the RX6600’s weird
performance madness, the RTX 4080 tops the charts for most scores in Adobe Photoshop
using the PugetBench test suite, provided by the awesome people over at Puget Systems.
In Lightroom Classic, the 4080 beats out even the 4090’s overall score, but for most tasks,
you’ll see marginal gains over the RTX 3080 and 3090, and right up against the 4090’s performance.
Benchmarking Affinity Photo (I know V2 just came out… let’s keep it consistent and stable for now,
yeah?) the RTX 4080 slots perfectly between the RTX 3090 and 4090, as it should.
What about video editing? Well, I’m glad you asked…
Using PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro sees the new 4080 land a fair bit higher than the RTX 3090,
just under the RTX 4090. Interestingly, export and playback scores were slightly higher than the
RTX 4090, meanwhile the Effects and GPU scores were lower. If you’re doing GPU-heavy workloads
at 4K and higher, you’ll absolutely want a 4090, but most editors will be just fine with a 4080.
This carries over into BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve. Resolve just got a new update
to version 18.1 that brings a bunch of new features like AI audio cleanup that
works surprisingly well, fixes my Windows fractional UI scaling
issues I’ve had for YEARS, and hugely improves performance for other tasks.
Running PugetBench, we see the 4080 put up pretty substantial gains - gains you
would feel - over last gen’s RTX 3080 and even the 3090. This is seriously impressive stuff.
If you were considering a 3090 or RTX Titan for video editing before around the $1000 price range,
I’d honestly consider throwing in a couple hundos extra to get this boost plus AV1 encode.
Exporting a sample 4K project, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 run LAPS around the
older cards in H265 and AV1 compared to Arc. They’re still faster than older
cards in H.264 too, but those newer codecs using the dual encoders… wow.
Throwing the card in my Threadripper Pro build to text my intense 8K project full of 8K RAW footage,
SuperScaled 4K footage, plugins and such… unfortunately the 4080 couldn’t export this,
just like the previous 80-tier cards I tested. I do feel like it needs just a little more VRAM
to make it happen - it is odd that we’re still only using 16GB of VRAM
on $1200 cards meanwhile Intel is throwing 16GB at $300 cards.
One of the big improvements with Resolve 18.1 is speed increases to AI-based Face
Tracking and object masking. The dev beta I had access to for my RTX 4090 review
was supposed to have performance boosts for this, too, but it either didn’t work
yet or wasn’t fully optimized because WHOO BOY this update is amazing. Scores dropped
by about 45% ACROSS THE BOARD. Even the older Ampere and Turing cards were faster,
though nowhere near as absurdly fast as Lovelace here. The 4080 is just barely behind the 4090,
and both leave the Ampere cards in the dust. Weirdly the RTX Titan isn’t too far behind
the 4080 and 4090, however - I guess there was some magic to that Titan after all.
Object masking didn’t improve as much with older generations,
but the RTX 4080 matches the 4090 here and puts up 17% faster speeds than older cards.
Very rad. Huge shouts out to the Resolve team for nailing such a big update, and if
you do video editing every day like I do, this new generation is going to earn your time back fast.
Unfortunately, I can’t test raw encode speed with Handbrake at the moment,
as the builds seem to think NVENC isn’t available on the 4080 even though it
works on 4090. We’ll do some deeper encoder coverage soon once support is more widely
rolled out. FFMPEG JUST started getting NVENC AV1 support, too. This stuff takes time. :)
Diving into more AI tools, upscaling video to 4K using Topaz Labs’ Video Enhance AI, the RTX 4080
is a tad slower than the 4090, but still almost a minute faster than the RTX 3090. Great to see.
Similar results are found in Gigapixel, upscaling 8 images shows the RTX 4080 10
seconds slower than the 4090, but still a fair bit faster than anything else.
Topaz fixed what was apparently a bug in their new PhotoAI app causing terrible performance in
all Nvidia cards in my last review and now has the RTX 4080 matching the speed of the RTX 4090, and
taking less than a THIRD of the time to upscale photos as the older cards. Now THIS is awesome.
Generating AI art with Stable Diffusion shows the RTX 4080 being a little slower than the
RTX 3090 in general, but still beating out the RTX Titan and 3080. I’m told by people
in these communities that there’s probably some optimization that can be done in the apps for
Stable to optimize specifically for Lovelace, so I’ll update you if that ever happens.
Using FlowFrames to AI interpolate a 60FPS video into 120FPS for slowmo,
the RTX 4080 is just a little faster than the RTX 3090. Nice. Now, Lovelace cards
have hardware built-in to do this in real-time with DLSS3 Frame Generation - as we can see with
the Unreal Engine 5 Lyra Demo - but there isn’t any software ready to take advantage
of this for prerecorded videos yet. Soon, I hope? DaVinci Resolve and OBS integration soon, please?
If you’re a 3D artist or VFX artist using 3D rendering,
the 4080 is no slouch, either. Now the RTX 4090 put up insane numbers doubling
the 3090’s performance in ways that you can’t fully expect here, but it’s close!
In Blender, benchmarking the Monster scene nets about 60% faster speed
over the RTX 3090 and 85% faster than the 3080. The Junkshop scene
benched about 29% faster than the 3090 and 50% faster than the 3080,
and the classic Classroom scene shows 55% faster performance than the 3090 and 82% faster than the
3080. So while it wasn’t going to be as absurdly fast as the 4090… these are some good gains.
The trend continues into Octane, where the RTX 4080 performs 42%
faster than the 4090 and 67% faster than the 3080. And just for kicks,
if you’re still on the RTX Titan… nearly 3X the performance. WOWZA.
Testing the V-Ray engine with the VRAY 5 benchmark is an oddity. the VRAY RTX test
shows the 4080 still trailing behind the RTX 4090 a fair bit, but leaping substantially
over the older generation GPUs, but in CUDA? For some reason I’m consistently scoring BELOW those
older cards in performance. I can’t explain this, but it’s certainly an anomaly that has
to be a bug or some other issue, given all the other performance we’re seeing here.
For streaming, again, the 4080 has the dual encoder chips that the 4090 has. I’ll point you
to the timecoded section of that video for now, but I’ll have a dedicated video coming soon. In a
nutshell, there’s now two hardware encoders on 40 series cards which can encode H.265 and AV1 faster
than ever AND can split up 4K or higher encodes across both chips to go even faster or higher
quality. This also enables 8K60 encoding in H265 and AV1, including in Shadowplay with H265. Using
this is fantastic for recording videos or streams to save on file size, or have nearly negligible
performance impact on your game compared to H264! YouTube and DaVinci Resolve already support AV1
for video editing. Hopefully streaming services start rolling out support before we get too far
into 2023. I’ve been using AV1 for most of my recordings and the new overall headroom to do
4:4:4 H265 encoding for my screen captures so punch-ins are clean and crisp. I also used it
to get clean and crisp 8K upscaling in DaVinci Resolve to maximize quality on YouTube as a test
for a video over on the StreamGuides channel and… it looks INCREDIBLE. Best-quality tutorial
I’ve EVER posted. Took forever to process on YouTube, but this might just be my new workflow.
The latest Nvidia driver also improved AV1 decoding performance,
too, which is nice to see. We’ll look at that more in-depth later.
Also I showcased in a follow-up video that Discord has AV1 support coming for Go Live streams later
this month. It looks awesome - though there is an awkward song and dance of it getting forced
to H264 if someone connects with a GPU that doesn’t have AV1 decode support - possibly
even non-Nvidia GPUs? I’m not sure yet, but due to how the Discord streams work by sending video
directly to the receiver rather than a server, I could see that being awkward if someone joins
a group call without support and quality tanks - but it’s a net positive that support is being
added at all, and I seriously hope they add Arc, Radeon, and SVT-AV1 support very soon.
As a glimpse into gaming performance, 3DMark TimeSpy has this card soaring above last-gen,
but still landing squarely behind the RTX 4090 at 1440p Ultra. Using the DLSS
benchmark, we see the 4080 performing a little above the 3090 with DLSS off,
but seeing similar gains to the 4090 when running DLSS3,
and almost exactly matching the 4090’s framerate with DLSS2 Quality mode. Interesting.
In the Unreal Engine 5 Lyra Demo at 1440p Epic settings, the RTX 4080 performs a solid amount
higher than the 3090 taking average FPS from 80 to almost 99FPS, and the lows lock into a mostly
rock-solid 60FPS experience. And then is just soars above the rest once any DLSS tools come
into play, even with Frame Generation off. Things are looking up for UE5 games on next
gen hardware. I’m very slowly working on my own game concept using the Lyra base project, too!
I hope to play more games on this soon, but in the meantime I have a documentary to finish. You see…
Just a few short years ago, I wouldn't have imagined I'd be doing dedicated hardware
testing for JUST content creators and streamers on a regular basis. And just like 10 years ago,
I wouldn't have imagined this work would be as accessible as it is. To reflect on that,
I've been wokring on my own documentary series reflecting on digital content creation and
how we got there from the analog era. That series is called PrntScrn and it premieres
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Links to my previous recent GPU reviews are linked below,
as well as my expansion coverage. Don’t worry, we’re not done testing everything just yet,
this is just a teaser of what’s to come. In the meantime remember to be kind, rewind!