Final words and conclusion
.final words
As stated in a couple of other reviews. Boost clock frequency these days matters LESS, and that's because of the many protection limiters the card has active. Even if the GPU could manage 2100 MHz, you'd still have an energy budget in the 325 Watt range, and that makes the card throttle down. That's the big denominator and limiting factor for premium graphics cards these days when we talk about tweaking performance, and as a side effect of it, board partners have a harder time differentiating themselves. I say this because all AIB cards (and Founder) will perform roughly the same with a scanty percentual variation here and there. NVIDIA is now really competing with their own founder design cards, which is a dilemma for the AIB partners as well. In the end, that will drive the commitment from board partners upward to produce an even better product. So I guess the question needs to be, would you prefer this card over a founder edition?
.performance
Our performance paragraph 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 exceptional 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 true 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 will 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 beginning at a Quad HD resolution (2560x1440), but again I deem this to be an Ultra HD targeted product. In contrast, 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 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
Depending on the level of airflow inside your chassis, expect the card to sit in the 70 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions, which is fine for a card of this caliber. In extremely stressed conditions, we'd hit 38 DBA marker, which is considered a very decent performing acoustic level. Use the extra fan or not? Well, you can shave off a few degrees with it, but yeah it does look a little ominous right?
.energy
The power draw under intensive gaming for GeForce RTX 3080 remains to be significant. We measured it to be close to the 325~350 Watt range. This is the tradeoff for a bit more bite in performance for this graphics cared model in particular. 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 care about it? We dispute that as well.
.coil whine
This GeForce RTX 3080 did exhibit only minor amounts of coil squeak, far less than the founder card we tested. Is it disturbing? Well, 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 currently expected to be 789 EUR incl vat (in the Netherlands). This will vary per country.
.Tweaking
We fired of several tweaking scenarios at the card; the Ampere GPU is difficult to tweak. Much like we have seen with other cards, the tweaks on the clock frequency and memory stick, and run fine, but the performance just was lower. New safety protection is active on memory. A +1000 Mhz would work, but result in poor performance yet reveal no stability issues. Ergo +500 as max currently is what I'd recommend on the RTX 3080 cards (but this will also differ per caird and brand). 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 +25 to +75MHz, but here again, that will vary per board, brand and even card (ASIC quality). So in the end I expect 20 and if you are very lucky 21 Gbps on the memory subsystem (effective), and with added turbo Core frequency and added power, you should see your card hovering at a 1.9~2.0 GHz range on the GPU Boost clock (which is pretty awesome for something with this many transistors). Leading for a GPU tweak these days is how much power you are allowed to assign the GPU, the Power limiter.
.conclusion
GALAX always offers a bit more with their products, often something novel like buttons that increase airflow, designs with OLED/LED display screens. It's been quite a ride to see what they've come up with over the years. This time they came up with the idea to add an extra fan, optional at the backside. The exciting part is that the standard 3-fan design already is plentiful for anything you need to do. It does that without being loud, and it cools at very reasonable and satisfactory levels. So would you use it that rear fan? I don't know, it looks a little awkward, and the reality is that aesthetics have become such an important factor these days. But hey lucky me, that is is your call to make. You, of course, want good looks, a product that runs it's operation temperatures at proper levels, and a price tag to go along with that. For most, if not all, these features, GALAX checks all the right boxes with the Serious Gaming model. It does cool properly, and the sheer looks are lovely (but the taste is of course, subjective). Performance-wise really, all cards released will be within a 4~5% margin towards each other, so that can no longer be a decisive factor in the year 2020. This card, with its current setup, sits at founder performance level, but you do have the ability to tweak out that extra 4~5% if your card runs reference frequencies. If we filter out the challenges (power consumption and pricing), then we can only acknowledge that the sheer performance this card series brings to the table is anything short from being impressive. 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 standard rendered game) performance is staggering as this many shader cores 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 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. GALAX has a lovely and somewhat unique offering here with the SG edition. We're not exactly sure how prices will pan out for this model, but if priced at founder edition levels, heck I could certainly and wholeheartedly recommend it.
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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.
