GeForce RTX 4080 Founder edition review - Introduction

GeForce RTX 4080 founder edition review

Today we review the formidable GeForce RTX 4080 16GB, the second graphics card in the ADA Lovelace generation. NVIDIA's card is up to two times as fast as the RTX 3080 while keeping it in the same pricing range. The new graphics card provides greater performance at all fronts, more extensive raytracing features, and DLSS 3.0 thanks to upgraded Tensor cores. 

While we all had a reasonably dull year in terms of technology, 2022 is loaded with new releases. Among them were NVIDIA's ADA GPU architecture graphics cards for the consumer market. The company has unveiled its new GPU design for next-generation gaming PCs. In the short term, two or three variants of GPUs are expected in the first launch wave, each one will outperform the Ampere 3000 series somehow. NVIDIA's RTX 4000 GPUs will provide impressive performance, but next-gen graphics cards may have to contend with alternatives like AMD's rDNA3 and Intel's Arc Alchemist. Where GeForce RTX 4090 is Nvidia's flagship model in the new series, the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB takes a step down. This product is configured with 9728 shading cores offering 49 Shader-TFLOPS of power for traditional rasterized graphics rendering. Add to that 304 Fourth Generation Tensor Cores and 76 Third Generation raytracing cores and you're bound to get some serious performance. NVIDIA claims the GeForce RTX 4080 is twice as fast as the GeForce 3080 Ti, but it uses almost 10% less power and costs the same as the GeForce 3080 Ti, which is $1199. As with all GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, the RTX 4080 is full of Ada innovations. These include Shader Execution Reordering (SER), the new RT core engines, and DLSS 3, which will give upcoming RTX games like Racer RTX and Cyberpunk 2077 with RT: Overdrive mode up to three times the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti. The RTX 4080 is great for making difficult content and gives the best gaming performance. Creators will also benefit from the extra memory when rendering larger scenes, editing 12K RAW video, and using multiple apps simultaneously. Experience feature-rich RTX acceleration in the best creative apps, world-class NVIDIA Studio drivers designed for maximum stability, and a suite of exclusive tools that use the power of RTX for AI-assisted creative workflows.

Initially, NVIDIA wanted to release two distinct GeForce RTX 4080 versions. A GeForce RTX 4080 12GB with GDDR6X RAM. Nvidia also announced a 16GB model of the RTX 4080. Due to market reception and confusion, NVIDIA decided to remove that 12GB version from its deck of cards (likely it'll end up being a 4070 (Ti)). The card's shader engine clock frequency is 2.21 GHz, with a boost clock of 2.51 GHz. This card has a 256-bit memory bus and a relatively okay tbp (total board power) of 320W. Today's review will examine NVIDIA's reference model, aka the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Founder Edition.