The Geforce 3080 is about 30% faster than the Geforce 2080 TI, for 40% less money.
But Nvidia stresses that it’s not meant to be compared to the 2080 TI. It is instead
a follow-up to the 2080, being released 2 years later and for the same price. In fact,
slightly less, since Nvidia’s edition of the card doesn’t come at a price premium
this time around. Unfortunately, since I don’t have a 2080,
I can’t compare it to that. I did some quick calculations and worked out that the 2080
TI is about 27% faster than the 2080, which would make the 3080 roughly 64% faster than
the 2080 in raw, 4K performance.
That’s a good generational leap. In terms of jumps in raw performance, that’s almost
double the jump from the 1080 to the 2080. And slightly less than the Geforce 980 to
the 1080 .
But I think, in many ways, comparisons to the 2080 TI are more interesting. Because
that WAS the fastest gaming card in the world, and now the 3080 is.
Until next week.
In terms of framerates, I didn’t even bother testing 1440p. It just does that resolution,
probably well over 100 FPS most of the time. I instead went straight to 4K, ultra settings.
To summarise: I would say my old 2080 TI was a 4K-capable card, but you had to choose between
Ultra settings at 45 fps, or very high at 60ish. The 3080, on the other hand, more often
than not attains 60 FPS, even on ultra settings. And in situations where the 2080 TI would
barely scrape 60 fps, the 3080 is now sitting comfortably in the 80’s. 4K has gone from
being a ‘doable’ resolution, to being one where the 3080 can comfortably handle
it, and with power to spare in all but the most demanding of games.
I’ll talk more about the benchmarks later for those of you who are interested, but for
now I’ll get onto other topics, because there’s a lot more to say about this card
than simply raw performance.
This is the first time Nvidia has used an 8 nm node. Until now they’ve been on 12
nm, which is interesting because AMD were already on 7, which on paper should have given
them the advantage, since smaller nodes means they can cram more stuff into the same space.
So simply by moving to 8 nm, it should give the RTX 3000 series an advantage over the
2000 series, even without anything else being done to them.
BUT it comes with down-sides, too. More stuff in the same area means that heat is more of
a problem. And, perhaps to counter this, this version of the 3080 uses Nvidia’s new cooling
design. As far as fans go, it’s pretty cool. It
has a fan on one side to suck cool air in, and a fan on the other end to blow it out
again. What’s surprising is that- even on the 3080, their ‘new flagship GPU ’, the
card itself is actually very short. If you get the angle right, you can see that this
whole end bit is actually just cooling fins and fans, meaning that the card itself ends
well before this point. I found this comparison with the previous generation that shows just
how much they’ve shrunk the design down for Ampere.
The card itself comes with 10 GB of Vram, which is a strange amount to have. Almost
as odd as the 11 GB found on my older 2080 TI. The large gap between the 3080’s 10
GB and the 3090’s 24 makes me think there will be a middle-ground option in the future
some time, possibly in the form of a 3080 TI or similar. But as Nvidia have said, more
RAM means more cost, so if this becomes a thing then expect to pay a premium for the
privilege. How much VRAM do you need? 8 GB has been the
standard ‘high-end’ amount for a while now, so with the 3080 we’re at least seeing
it creep past that. But I was surprised to see it only jump by 2 instead of the more
rounded 8 or 4 GB leaps. In their recent Q&A session, when questioned
about the 10 GB of VRAM, Nvidia stated that the 3080’s intended to give great performance
up to 4K resolution with all settings maxed out . This shouldn’t be a problem for most
people, who I suspect are still gaming at lower resolutions like 1440p. But if you’re
wanting to game at 8K, or on several high-resolution displays, then perhaps you’re better off
getting the 3090 instead. They say that the 3080 has surplus performance and RAM for today’s
titles, so I guess they feel it’s a balanced setup and that, by the time the RAM is no
longer enough, the card’s raw performance probably won’t be either.
The next thing to talk about is the power consumption. This was probably the most surprising
thing about this generation for me. I’ve said how smaller nodes generally help to improve
efficiency, but the power consumption of the 3000 series is still more than the previous
generation. As in, the 3080 consumes more power than the 2080 does and so on.
Again, it’s going to be rather approximate , but the 3070 is meant to be about as fast
as the 2080 TI, and manages it while consuming 12% less power. So there’s been an improvement,
but perhaps not as much of one as you might think, given the smaller node and various
optimisations this generation has had.
As for how efficient the 3080 is, it depends on what you compare it to. It consumes 28%
more power than the 2080 TI, while being 29% faster. In other words, it consumes more power,
for an equal jump in performance. And compared to the 2080, the 3080 consumes
about 50% more power while delivering 64% more performance. Which makes it sound better.
I know very little about the 3090 but it looks like the 3080 will be the least ‘efficient’
of the bunch for the level of performance it offers. But again, that’s just speculation
on my behalf based on the figures seen here.
To help power these new cards is a new connection type, which I rather like. You get an adapter
which gets the power from 2x8 pins and crams it down into a much smaller footprint on the
card itself. Plus, this extra cable gives more room to reach the connector, which is
always welcome. Some friendly advice: It’s recommended that
you use an 8 pin from 2 DIFFERENT cables coming from your PSU. So don’t use 2 from the same
daisy-chained cable. Just in case it overloads it or whatever. I’ll admit, I’m a bit
paranoid about this sort of stuff. I’ve had a history of PSUs blowing up on me. I
actually have a phobia of using the switch on the back because so many have popped or
exploded as I’ve done that. Probably BECAUSE I do stupid stuff like to daisy-chain PCI
cables together in pretty but totally inappropriate ways. And I did it with the 3080 for a while
as well and nothing bad happened. But you never know! 2 different cables. And if your
PSU doesn’t allow for that… then maybe your PSU isn’t up to the task in the first
place. A 750 watt PSU is recommended for the 3080 .
So the leap in efficiency over the 2000 series isn’t anything special. But the Ampere architecture
the 3080’s based on has a number of other improvements over Turing which are worth mentioning.
Namely the first step towards 8K support. I don’t think many people are considering
8K at the moment, but it’s nice to see they’re paving the way for it.
These 8K improvements comprise of…. Shadowplay recordings in up to 8K quality!
But only at 30 FPS. Still, we’ve come so far. I remember the 600 series was able to
record at 1080p 60 FPS and 1440p at 30 FPS. Then the 900 series jumped it up to 4K 60
fps. So it’s cool another step has been made, even if it won’t be of much use to
me because I think 4K at 60 is more useful to me at the moment.
There’s also support for AV1 decoding . Why should you care about this? It enables high
quality videos at incredibly small filesizes, and it’s already rolling out to Netflix
and Youtube. Problem is, it takes a huge amount of processing power to play. Most processors
would struggle with it at 4 or 8K, so being able to offload this task onto GPUs is great
news. Over on Nvidia’s site they even say that the ‘next generation of game streaming’
could involve 1440p, 120 fps videos, which av1 makes possible even on a humble 8 mbps
connection. So THAT’S why av1 decoding’s cool.
And the last 8K-related feature is a new DLSS mode. 9x scaling means it’s actually rendering
at 1440p, then uses AI to upscale it all the way up to 8K. I know what you’re thinking-
it’s quite a leap to claim an upscaled 1440p image can be ‘8K’… but I can believe
it. DLSS has managed amazing things with its 4x scaling. And while its representation of
higher resolutions isn’t always perfect, when you reach resolutions as high as 8K it
doesn’t really matter too much at a per-pixel level.
What I THINK might happen here is that it’ll look clearest after a few frames of the player
standing still, but the limitations of this upscaling approach will be evident during
moving shots. It’s just that, at 8K, nobody’s going to notice this when the scene’s in
motion! You can see a comparison here between 4K native and 8K DLSS, presumably using this
new super-performance mode , and it looks undeniably and significantly sharper and more
detailed. Let’s be honest here- few people will have
a setup capable of 8K, and fewer still will be in a position where they can analyse it
in sufficient depth to know the specifics of what it’s capable of. It seems like this
feature is being marketed for the 3090 with its 24 GB of RAM. So I’ll admit, I haven’t
checked it out with the 3080 just yet, but is something I’m interested in trying.
DLSS has also got support for VR and variable resolutions. VR is particularly interesting,
because it’s something where you need high resolutions AND framerates. So DLSS seems
like the perfect match for this kind of task .
And there is a claim Nvidia made that I’d like to investigate. There was a slide that
showed Ampere delivering 1.9x the performance/watt that Turing could. But this doesn’t correlate
with the new TDPs and speed increases we’ve seen. Instead, what they’re saying is: if
a Turing card, at 100% load, can reach, say, 62 FPS in Control, then a 3080 limited to
that same 62 FPS will draw significantly less power.
In other words: at its stated TDP, the 3000 series IS faster than the 2000 series. OR,
if you limit Ampere to a framerate that Turing can already hit, then Ampere will be up to
1.9x more efficient at achieving that framerate. But you can’t have the best of both worlds
at the same time. I don’t think this is unique to Ampere. I’d expect efficiency
improvements at capped framerates with every new, faster generation of cards. But regardless,
I set out to try and replicate this efficiency improvement, just to get a feel for how to
obtain it in practice. For this I ran Nvidia’s own benchmarking
tool, Frameview, which documents framerates AND the power required to produce each one.
As to be expected, the results I got were highly dependent on the resolutions and settings
used. Total perf/w in Control, raytracing on, at 960p upscaled to 1440p using DLSS looks
like it achieves similar to the claimed 1.9x leap.
So it’s not like the 3000 series can’t be 1.9x more efficient than the 2000 series.
But it would be wrong to assume that they’re that much more efficient under normal use.
It requires deliberate framerate capping- something you might expect to see in, say,
a laptop, where you may want to hit a playable framerate and graphical quality, then to go
no further because it would simply drain the battery to do so.
Another example might be if you’re playing a game that the 3000 series can run uncapped
at… 800 FPS. You might decide that’s a waste of its power, and to instead cap it
to your monitor’s refresh rate to get a still playable performance, but to keep your
PC cooler, quieter and more efficient instead. The 1.9x efficiency leap isn’t incorrect,
but you won’t experience it unless you artificially limit the framerates you’re getting.
Moving on, there’s a feature called REFLEX, which cuts down on the latency in certain
competitive games. It looks like this is being rolled out to older cards as well, with the
1660 Super shown to benefit from it too. It looks like it’s supported on a per-game
basis, of which Counter-Strike currently isn’t one of them.
One of the big leaps the next generation of consoles is making is to reduce loading times,
and to greatly improve how quickly new parts of a game world can be drawn. RTX IO appears
to be Nvidia’s implementation of it for PC. They show comparisons here- while a hard-drive
could take 38 seconds to load something, a fast SSD could take just 5, and aided by RTX
IO that can be reduced down to just 1.5 seconds. So that means no tea breaks between levels.
Or perhaps just very quick ones. So I don’t have much more to say, or to show about this
for now, just know that PCs will be getting support for one of the key selling features
of the new console generation.
And here are the benchmarks that I promised earlier.
To summarise the 3080, you have to go back in time to the story leading to this point.
The 2000 series was not considered a big leap over the 1000 series. It didn’t offer substantially
more raw performance. It didn’t shift the price/performance curve by much. And its RTX
features sounded cool, but weren’t widely supported at release. BUT, over the course
of that generation, raytracing and DLSS quietly improved and gained traction and support,
and it’s safe to say that today, have become extremely desirable features.
For this reason alone, I expect the 3000 series to be seen as attractive cards to have. Especially
now they have the raw power to run raytracing at high framerates. As well as this, the 3000
series introduces more new features, but I don’t think we’ll see the benefit of them
for a while. It’s just good to know things like fast streaming and low latency are supported.
But the 3000 series’ key selling point is that they offer more performance for less
money. I remember when every graphics generation was like this, and it’s so nice to see it
again. I’ve only been able to test the 3080. Yes, it’s supposed to be a follow-up to
the 2080, but I really think it’s going to be compared more to the previous flagship,
the 2080 TI, which it manages to be considerably faster AND cheaper than.
Like I said, I’ve only tested the 3080, so it would be extremely unprofessional for
me to speculate about the other cards this early on.
The 3070 claims to deliver the same performance as last generation’s flagship, at less than
half the price. Although it’s the cheapest of the 3000 series that’s been announced
so far, at $500 it’s still an expensive card. So I would expect more products to be
released further down the stack, like the 3060 which historically has been the tier
to deliver the best price-performance trade-off. And last is the 3090. It looks to be an absolute
beast, but I think if anything is undermined by how good the 3080 looks, and for half the
price. The 3090’s 24 GB of RAM make it seem like it’s intended for more than just gaming
and I would be surprised if a card DIDN’T come out to bridge the gap between these two.
But a lot of this depends on AMD’s response. Their RDNA 2 cards will be revealed at the
end of next month… and they’ve got a lot to do. It’s no longer just about offering
enough performance at an attractive price- it’s testament to Nvidia’s RTX efforts
that AMD is facing so much pressure to deliver their own competing raytracing and upscaling
solutions. Even I’m not unprofessional enough to speculate about this right now, but I see
the coming months as being the most exciting time the graphics card industry has had in
a very long time.