Hey PCWorld fans, Adam here to talk about my latest round of eGPU testing. Over the holiday
break I decided to stuff an RTX 3080 inside an external GPU enclosure to see how it performed.
I played some of the biggest games of the past year like Cyberpunk 2077 and Flight
Sim 2020 so hang tight because you’ll definitely want to see these numbers.
Last July I tested an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super inside an eGPU and found some interesting
results. With the release of Nvidia’s 30-series graphics cards I was chomping at the bit to see
what performance is like with newer games inside this enclosure. In this video I’ll go over the
frame rates I experienced in over 10 games, but first, let’s cover the hardware I used.
The laptop of choice this time around was my new video production laptop,
a Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED WB. I’ll be doing another video specifically about this
laptop later so be sure to subscribe to check that one out when it lands.
Inside this particular model is an Intel Core i7-10875H CPU paired with a Nvidia GeForce RTX
2070 Max-Q GPU. The panel is a gorgeous 4k 60Hz AMOLED screen - one of the best I’ve seen on a laptop.
For eGPU I once again used my Asus XG Station Pro that I got last year.
I’m still really happy with this enclosure from a hardware perspective
and it’s definitely held up to lots of handling. I stuffed it with an EVGA
GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra Gaming GPU connected to the laptop over Thunderbolt 3.
Unfortunately this eGPU only supports up to 330 watts over two 8-pin connectors,
so it’s underprepared for this card and it’s 3 8-pin plugs. I had to do a bit of a frankenstein
set up to add a second power supply to the mix - and boy did this look silly. Either way I got
it up and running with minimal problems thanks to some help from our fine folks over on our Discord.
Now I want to stress that this isn’t meant to be a scientific experiment and it’s more
of a rough guideline of performance in this particular situation. While I was gaming I had
the GeForce Experience frame counter overlay on and was tracking it during my gameplay sessions.
What I’m reporting here is what I considered to be a safe FPS average of my play time,
erroring on the side of the worst case results. In some cases I did
run in game benchmarks, but those numbers were backed up with actual gameplay as well.
I ended up testing over 10 games, each configured differently so I could experiment across unique
configurations. Once I locked down the settings in the game that I found most interesting I tested it
4 different ways. The first scenario was running it on the 2070 that is inside the laptop.
The second scenario was using the eGPU with the laptop’s monitor. The third
scenario was disabling the laptops monitor and running the eGPU to an external monitor.
And the fourth scenario was running the 3080 inside my gaming tower paired with an Intel Core i9-9900ks.
So without further delay, let’s get to the results! The first game to talk about is
the newest Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War. I also did some testing in Warzone but I’ll cover that a bit later.
I played a number of matches per test, on a variety of maps.
Everything was run at 4k, with DLSS set to Ultra Performance and all settings on
high with the hi-res texture pack installed. When running Ray-tracing it was set to high.
Looking at the numbers we see some of the same results as last year. Playing on the laptops
monitor takes a hit to performance over playing on an external monitor for a number of reasons.
One of them is because the signal coming from the eGPU has to pass through the IGP
in order to get displayed on the monitor - which I confirmed in Task Manager - and that overhead
creates a bottleneck. When it's running to an external monitor it’s plugged straight into the 3080
and there is nothing in it’s way, at that point we hit the bandwidth limitations of Thunderbolt 3.
And while that performance hit is expected, what I didn’t expect was for the laptops
2070 to deliver the same performance as the 3080 ran out to an external monitor. This
whole eGPU setup is over $1000 dollars so it’s obviously not worth it in this game.
Moving next to Doom Eternal I did multiple runs through the first half hour of the game at 4k
set to the Ultra Nightmare preset. Bringing up the numbers, it shows the 3080 ahead of
the internal 2070 in every scenario this time. We also see that the 3080 in the egpu gets closer to
the full 3080 performance compared to Call of Duty. That delta continues to shift per game,
but this is one of the best examples of the 3080 not being too held back in this setup. Overall
the experience was super smooth here - which is important for twitch shooters like Doom.
Next up is the Witcher 3. And even though it’s an older game, I’m still slowly getting through
the Blood & Wine expansion so I wanted to include it. Like last year I ran it at 4k
with graphics set to ultra, post processing set to high, and Hairworks completely off - so
basically everything maxed out except Hairworks. Unfortunately, none of the options using the
laptops display were able to hit and maintain a stable 60, but piping out to the external monitor
got close. I didn’t run into too much hitching in this scenario so it was definitely playable.
Revisiting another older game, and one of my favorites of all time, I wanted to see
just how far I could push Control’s ray tracing performance. In this set up I ran the game at 4k
with DLSS set to 1440p and both presets set to high. I did a number of fights in areas where
the game would choke so it’s definitely the worst case scenario here. Surprisingly Control
didn’t perform well in any of scenarios using the laptops monitor, even with ray tracing off. This
is a demanding game for sure, but I was hoping to get more than a smooooth 30 out of this eGPU.
And because I wanted to continue punishing myself I fired up Cyberpunk 2077 and really pushed the
limits of my stomach. This was by no means the right way to play the game but I had to do it - ya
know, for science. I ran the game at 4k with the preset set to high, with DLSS on Balanced,
and maxed out all the ray tracing settings. Needless to say, the results were even rougher
than what happened on Control. With these settings it was at least playable on the full tower, but
the rest of the results didn’t make for pleasing game sessions. But once again, this isn’t how I
would try to play it on a laptop, I just wanted to see if there were any interesting results under
such a load. I’ll note this was before the big 1.1 patch so things might be a bit different now.
One more stress test for you, I wanted to see how Flight Sim 2020
(aka The Full Nerds best game of 2020) worked out on this setup. I set the resolution to 4k but
dropped the rendered resolution to 1080p and used the medium preset. I flew a Cessna CJ4 from SFO to
Oakland International Airport by way of downtown San Francisco at 10am with scattered clouds. I
got a range of results here so let me explain. When flying lower to the ground the GPU was under
heavier loads than cruising over 4000 feet and that performance was pretty consistent - so that's
why I included both numbers. And to tell you the truth I was blown away by just how punishing this
game is at 1080p medium in this situation. I was also surprised to see the 2070 outperform
the 3080 using the laptop's monitor, showing that bottleneck was really
holding it back like it was in Call of Duty.
Moving back to some playable frame rates, I loaded up Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
and played the School 2 level at 4k max. In every scenario I was able to get at least a solid 60,
even when using the 2070 in the laptop. Like Doom Eternal having smooth gameplay
is really important here and luckily it ran pretty damn well. We’re still not
matching that full tower performance but at least I was able to have a good time.
The last games to show off here are all in-game benchmark runs, with the first one being Horizon:
Zero Dawn. For this scenario I ran the game at 4k but scaled it down to 1080p with the internal scaler
and maxed out all the settings. Bringing up the results we see one of the worst examples of performance
for that 3080 inside the eGPU. Not only were the frame rates well under 60, there was a lot of stuttering
which made the experience really unplayable. The 2070 in the laptop performed much better.
The next game to show off is Assassins Creed Valhalla. For this one I used the
built in benchmark running the game at 4k but dropping the rendered resolution down to 1080p.
I used the High preset and turned off adaptive resolution. The results here were very interesting
indeed. Not only did the 2070 inside the laptop outperform the 3080 in both eGPU scenarios,
I actually struggled for a while to get Valhalla to even recognize the 3080 when
using the laptop’s monitor. For some reason this game didn’t want to grab the card in the eGPU
when using the internal display and I was stuck troubleshooting for a while. I was just about to
give up when I was able to make it work so I’m glad I had a result to include. It’s beyond my
understanding as to why this game in particular had the 3080 fare worse than the 2070 and showed the biggest
delta between the 3080 in the eGPU and in the tower, but I’ll try to dig some more.
The last game with charts is Hitman 3, and did some benchmark runs using the Dubai scene with
everything maxed out at 4k. Looking at the numbers we see the typical results, with the 3080 in the
tower running at double the framerate compared to the eGPU displayed on an external monitor.
At least you could get a solid 60 with that set up whereas the 2070 in the laptop could only push
a smooth 30. I did run into a weird hiccup when using the laptop's monitor with the eGPU though.
Inside the config launcher you can manually select which GPU to use,
but it worked backwards when the internal GPU isn’t disabled. So with the 3080 selected I got
a number of 33 and with the 2070 selected I got a number of 53. That didn’t really make sense to me,
and after scratching my head for a bit I did some digging and sure enough it used the opposite GPU
than what was selected. So many weird things I’ve experienced when using an eGPU that's for sure.
Now like I mentioned earlier, I did do a bunch of testing in Call of Duty: Warzone,
specifically around the new Rebirth Island map. But I kept running into wild performance
variations and couldn’t get reliable results that I was comfortable sharing.
When it was stable the numbers that I was seeing roughly lined up to what was seen in Cold War,
but with these crazy drops in performance that seemed to strike at random.
So to wrap it up, is it worth it to stick an RTX 3080 inside an eGPU? Well first off you have to
find one. Secondly, I’ll say if you do you should probably get a card that doesn’t require 3 8-pin
power plugs - that was definitely a hassle. But overall I saw a lot of the same limitations of
Thunderbolt 3 in play here like I did with the 2070 Super, but even more exaggerated.
In the last round of testing the 2070 Super playing on an external monitor
got close to full tower performance in some games but that didn’t happen this
time. Obviously it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison but the 3080 was definitely being held back
and on average I was only getting half the performance of a full tower with that card.
Now I have more testing planned and I’m hoping to get my hands on that Asus ROG Flow X13 to
check out that proprietary solution. If you do run an eGPU system and have some
performance tips please let me know in the comments, I’ll be sure to check them out.
In the meantime stay tuned to PCWorld for more PC hardware coverage, I’ll catch you later!