Final words and conclusion
.final words
We love what the new Ampere cards bring to the table and have been anxiously awaiting the AIB card. Surprisingly enough, ASUS did not submit the STRIX model immediately. That's okay as we like to review product that is much closer to the founder edition pricing. Speaking of the founder edition card, these are a problem for the AIB partners as NVIDIA has released something delicious and nice-looking with the founder edition. In the end, that will drive the commitment from board partners upward to deliver an even better product. While we're still not sure what availability on the market will be, the TUF Gaming should be at or around that founder edition MSRP to make real sense. It's a good product though, we have little to complain about cooling and acoustics. The design is a performance thing of course, and personally, I do like the look of the founder edition better so that is a tough call to make.
.performance
We need to start with performance, it is a generic paragraph used on all RTX 3080 reviews as the performance is more or less the same for all cards and brands. Gaming it can do well, with outstanding values. Yes, at Full HD you'll be quite often bottlenecked and CLU limited. But even there in some games with proper programming and that right API (DX12/ASYNC), the sheer increase in performance is staggering. The good old rasterizer engine first, as hey it is still the leading factor. Pure speaking from a shading/rasterizing point of view you're looking at 125% to 160% performance increases seen (relative) from the similar priced GeForce RTX 2080 (SUPER), so that is a tremendous step. The unimaginable number of shader processors is staggering. The new FP32/INT32 combo clusters remain to be a compromise that will work exceptionally well in most use cases, but likely not all of them. But even then there are so many shader cores that not once the tested graphics card was slower than an RTX 2080 Ti, in fact (and I do mean in GPU bound situations) the RTX 2080 stays ahead by at least a margin of a relative 125%, bot more often 150% and even 160%. Performance-wise we can finally say hey, this is a proper Ultra HD capable graphics card (aside from Flight Simulator 2020 haha, that title needs D3D12/AYSNC en some DLSS!). The good news is that with any game that uses traditional rendering will run excellent at 3840x2160. Games that can raytrace and manage DLSS also become playable in UHD. A good example was battlefield V with Raytracing and DLSS enabled, in Ultra HD now running in that 75 FPS bracket. Well, you've seen the numbers in the review, I'll mute now. DXR Raytracing and tensor performance, the RTX 30 series have been received new tensor and RT cores. So don't let the RT and Tensor core count confuse you. They're located close inside that rendering engine, became more efficient and that shows.
If we look at an RTX 2080 with port Royale, we'd hit almost 30 FPS. The RTX 3080 nearly doubles that at 53 FPS. Tensor cores are harder to measure, but overall from what we have seen, it's all in good balance. Overall though, the GeForce RTX 3080 starts to make sense starting at a Quad HD resolution (2560x1440), but again I deem this to be an Ultra HD targeted product, whereas for 2560x1440 I'd see the GeForce RTX 3070 see playing a more important roll in terms of sense and value for money. At Full HD then the inevitable GeForce RTX 3060, whenever that may be released. Games like Red Dead Redemption will make you aim, shoot, and smile at 70 FPS in UHD resolutions with the very best graphics settings. As always comparing apples and oranges, the performance results vary here and there as each architecture offers advantages and disadvantaged in certain game render workloads. So, for the content creators among us, have you seen the Blender and V_Ray NEXT results? No, go towards page 30 of this review and your eyes will pop out. The sheer compute performance has early exponentially doubled one step in the right direction. We need to stop for a second, and talk VRAM, aka framebuffer memory. The GeForce RTX was fitted with new GDDR6X memory, it clocks in at 19 Gbps, and that is a freakfest of memory bandwidth, which the graphics card really likes. You'll get 10GB of it. I can also tell you that there are plans for a 20GB version. We think initially the 20GB was to be released as the default, but for reasons none other than the bill of materials used, it became 10GB. In the year 2020 that is a very decent amount of graphics memory. Signals are however that the 20GB version may possibly become available in a later stage, for those that want to run Flight Simulator 2020 haha, that was a pun sorry. We feel 10GB right now is fine, but with DirectX Ultimate and added scene complexity and raytracing becoming the new norm, I do not so sure if that's still enough two years from now.
.cooling & noise levels
The ASUS Cooler just works. When we opened it up we easily got impressed to the attention in detail, the FLIR images confirm that. Everything is padded and leading towards some form of heatsink or pipe, including GDDR6X. This was impressive to see. Depending on the level of airflow inside your chassis expect the card to sit in the 60~65 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions, which is just terrific for a card of this caliber. In extremely stressed conditions we did hit 38 DBA marker, but still, that is considered a silent to normal acoustic level.
.energy
The power draw under intensive gaming for GeForce RTX 3080 is really significant. We measured it to be in close to the 350 Watt range. Now that is a peak value under stressed conditions. Gaming wise that number will fluctuate a bit. Are we happy with that amount of energy consumption in the year 2020? No, not at all. Will you as an end consumer really care about it? We dispute that as well.
.coil whine
The ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 does exhibit some coil squeak however far less than the founder card we tested. Is it annoying? Hmm, it's at a level you can hear it softly. In a closed chassis however that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear a bit of coil whine/squeak.
.pricing
NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3080 $699. The AIB product is deemed and damned to be called the more premium products. And I already told you, that's no longer the case anymore as NVIDA's founder cards are directly competing with the AIB product. In a perfect scenario, I would like to see the AIB product cheaper than the founder edition. That's not the case. This card will be a few tenners more expensive seen over that founder edition card. The price is substantial 824,- incl vat in the Netherlands.,
.tweaking
Tweaking was a bit of a challenge. I've had quite a puzzling time. The tweaks on the clock frequency and memory stick and run fine, but the performance just was lower. A +1000 Mhz would result in poor performance but no stability issues, but performance became worse than reference. This is new protection introduced at the memory subsystem, overclocking can result in lower performance. The mechanism detects errors and adapts to that. The positive side effect is that this mechanism prevents crashing. It however makes tweaking memory far more challenging. Ergo +500 max on memory currently is what I'd recommend on the RTX 3080 cards. Of course, increase the power limiter to the max so your GPU gets more energy budget, and then the GPU clock can be increased anywhere from +40 to +100 MHz, but that will vary per board, brand and card. So in the end I expect 20~21 Gbps on the memory subsystem (effective), and with a +75 Core frequency and added power, you should see your card hovering at a 2 GHz range (which is pretty awesome).
.conclusion
You receive a product that will be dominant in that Ultra HD space. Your games average out anywhere from 60 to 100+ FPS, well aside from Flight Simulator 2020. Dropping down in resolutions does create other challenges; you'll be far less GPU bound, but then again, we do not expect you to purchase a GeForce RTX 3080 and play games in 1920x1080. Arbitrarily speaking, starting at a monitor 2560x1440 resolution, that's the domain where the GeForce RTX 3080 will start to shine. The raw shading/rasterizer (read a normal rendered game) performance is staggering as this many shader cores really make a difference. The new generational architecture tweaks for Raytracing and Tensor also is significant. Coming from the RTX 2080, the RTX 3080 exhibited a roughly 85% performance increase, and that is going to bring hybrid raytracing towards higher resolutions. DXR will still remain to be massively demanding of course, but when you can plat Battlefield V iN ultra HD with Raytracing and DLSS enabled at over 70 FPS, hey, I'm cool with that. Also, CUDA compute performance in Blender and V-Ray, OMG!
Where is the extra performance coming from you might wonder? Well, the turbo frequency remains more or less the same. The memory runs reference 19 Gbps. The slightly increased gaming clock isn't going change things either; these days it is all about how much power a GU is allowed to consume. ASUS applied an increased power limitation (5%), e.g. it may consume more energy in return for extra performance. That combined brings in the extra 3~4% compared to reference performance. Performance-wise the TUF Gaming will be a tiny notch faster compared to reference thanks to the slightly higher memory clock. It overclocked quite a bit more productive as well (compared to the founder). IT all will remain marginal for all AIB cards that we'll test, though. The performance for all cards we expect will be close to each other. That leaves design, cooling, and preference. Well, that a dual 8-pin power header. We cannot complain as to what this card brings to the table in terms of raw power, so in the end, it will be user choice, pricing, and brand interest that will set the base for your purchasing decision. I cannot help thinking though that the STRIX at a reasonable price would be the product to get. But we'll have to check that one out at a later stage.
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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.
