Holy crap this thing is huge!
I guess that's fitting though because the price tag is also huge.
I'm not going to beat the RTX 4080 to death over it's price though because that's already
been done by every tech media outlet on the internet. I'm simply here to show you
what the RTX 4080 can do in VR and let you decide whether or not it's worth buying one.
As you know the RTX 4080 is one of the most powerful GPU's in Nvidia's current product stack,
so it should be no surprise that it absolutely destroys older VR titles like Beat Saber,
Contractors and Vader Immortal to name a few.
Because the 4080 is WAY O.P. for games like those I'm not going to spend a lot of time on them but
I do want to at least touch briefly on them to give you an idea of just how powerful the 4080 is.
In Beat Saber the RTX 4080 delivered 120fps at 4704 x 2384 with the render
scaling in game set to 1.8, which is the highest it goes by the way,
and all the other settings at their maximum values. I did turn anti-aliasing off though
because with the render scale this high the graphics are so sharp and clear it looks
fantastic. Anti-aliasing softens the edges of objects and text making them appear blurry
which I find VERY off putting so in my opinion it looks better without AA, therefore I turn it off.
Just like Beat Saber the 4080 ran Contractors at 120fps at 4704 x 2384
with all the in game graphics set to Ultra, other than anti-aliasing which I set to Low
for the same reason as I previously explained. Even in Contractors most
graphically intense maps the 4080 had plenty of performance headroom to spare in this game.
Vader Immortal is another game you can run on a potato and as previously mentioned the 4080
also ran this game at 4704 x 2384 at 120Hz with the in game graphics set to High. In
most areas of the game the performance headroom percentage was in the 60's and
70's which means this game hardly taxed the 4080 at all. Even in this scene where you
fight this droid and there's some lighting and particle effects from your light saber battle,
the performance headroom never consistently dropped below 50%.
All my testing was done using the Zotac RTX 4080 AMP Extreme Airo on my Ryzen 7 5800X3D
test PC with 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR 4 3600MHz CL16 RAM and Resizable BAR enabled.
Moving up to a much newer game that's a bit more demanding I tried Red Matter 2 at the same
resolution and refresh rate as the previous three games. I wasn't able to max out it's settings but,
the 4080 was able to maintain 120fps with Indirect and Dynamic shadows both turned on
and the in game Resolution Scale set to 1.3. If you've watched my other GPU VR performance
videos these areas of the game will look very familiar to you because I've found
these areas contain the most graphically intense elements in Red Matter 2 for a GPU to render.
In most areas of the game I could easily set the Resolution Scale even higher with the 4080,
but in this area as I was looking at these rockets, our performance headroom
almost completely bottomed out which is why I settled on the settings I did.
Assetto Corsa was yet another game the 4080 managed 120fps in at 4704 x
2384 with all the games settings maxed out, other than anti-aliasing of course. As you
can see on the performance headroom graph though this pushed the 4080 right to it's
limits. Other than the very beginning of the race when there was a bunch of smoke effects
on screen from all the cars taking off I never saw performance headroom drop below zero again
and the frame rate stayed right at our target of 120fps throughout all the benchmark runs.
The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners is the one game where I have seen the most fluctuation in
the frame rate and in the amount of performance headroom no matter which graphics card I've been
testing with and the 4080 was no different. I mean the performance fluctuates in all games based on
what's on screen at any given time but this game is the only one I've tested that has dramatic dips
in certain situations. Sometimes when just looking around there are dips where the frame rate drops
a bunch, but then comes right back. And every time I've ever engaged with a walker the frame
rate takes a pretty significant hit. The 4080 did fare better than other GPU's I've tested
but for whatever reason that's just how this game behaves. When these frame rate dips happen though
the moments are so brief they usually always go unnoticed by me as I'm playing so the experience
wasn't bad by any means. But, since this is what I encountered I feel I have to point it out. Like
all the other games thus far I set the render resolution in the Oculus PC app to 4704 x 2384,
the refresh rate to 120Hz, the in game Pixel Density to 150% and all the other graphical
settings to Ultra except for anti-aliasing which, once again, I turned off and overall the 4080
delivered the best looking and best playing experience in this game I've had to date.
Ok, now we're getting into the real heavy hitters.
Half Life Alyx was one of the first games where when starting it up I wondered if I was still
going to be able to max the settings out with it or not. With the render resolution still at 4704
x 2384, the refresh rate at 120Hz and the in game Performance Option set to Ultra Fidelity,
as you can see the 4080 just keeps flexin' with a rock solid 120fps and enough performance headroom
left in the tank to take things even further. All I can say is Half Life Alyx is an amazing
game and the RTX 4080 is able to deliver this VR masterpiece in all it's glory,
and it's
Glorious!
Lone Echo 2, in all my previous testing, has been one of the games where I've had to most
often make compromises on the graphics settings, or the refresh rate or both
to get it to run well. So I first tried it at 90Hz with all the in game settings maxed out,
other than anti-aliasing of course, and it both looked and ran great. The performance
headroom was really good in most areas at these settings so I decided to see what would happen if
we upped the refresh rate to 120Hz and somewhat to my surprise the 4080 handled it just fine.
Typically in this game areas like this where there is a lot of this glowing biomass around
are the most taxing on a GPU and as you can see the 4080 once again flexed all over this game.
Now for the game that brings every GPU to it's knees,
Microsoft Flight Simulator.
To give us a 1 to 1 comparison with GPU's I've reviewed in the past I used the same in game
settings I've used before; that being, setting the Render Scaling to 100 along with the World
Scale and Terrain and Objects Level of Detail. Every other option I set to it's lowest value
possible. I started with the refresh rate at 90Hz and check this out! The 4080 was hanging
in there! This is one of the training flights over Sedona, Arizona which isn't nearly as
demanding as flying over a city, like New York or London, but still this is something no other
GPU I've tested has been able to do, maintain an almost constant 90fps in VR on this flight.
I then cued up a flight over New York City and while I was hoping for more, this is
still the best result in VR in this game I've ever gotten. There was quite a bit of fps fluctuation
throughout the flight but there was also a fair amount of time the frame rate settled in at 45fps
and stayed there, which again, no other GPU I've tested to this point has been able to do.
Of course the conundrum is an RTX 4080 costs at least twelve hundred U.S. dollars
and the particular Zotac model I'm using, the Amp Extreme Airo,
I paid just over $1400.00 for after tax which is A LOT of money to pay,
in my opinion, for a GPU that is WAY more powerful than most VR games currently require.
Is it awesome to have that power at your disposal?
Absolutely!
But is it necessary?
No it is not.
But like I said at the beginning of the video whether or not it's worth buying,
considering the performance you get, is ultimately up to you to decide.