Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is NVIDIA’s new SUPER refresh at the upper end of the RTX 40 series family. This new entrant, announced at CES 2024, replaces the GeForce RTX 4080 at a new price point of $999 utilizing the full AD103 die specifications.
In our testing today, we put the Founders Edition through its paces in many games against the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and GeForce RTX 4080 to see where it sits in performance. We tested DLSS Upscaling, Ray Tracing, and Frame Generation performance. We focused on the 4K gameplay experience, and what you are able to achieve in terms of playable performance with the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER.
Performance
In terms of ‘what’s playable’ though, the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is a very capable 4K gaming video card. It provides a playable gameplay experience in games at 4K. In Horizon Forbidden West the game is playable above 65FPS at 4K, and with DLSS Upscaling upwards to 90FPS average. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is slower at 4K, for this one turning on DLSS Upscaling will be needed for the smoothest gameplay at 4K.
Alan Wake 2 is playable for the type of game it is at 4K, though DLSS Upscaling can help quite a bit. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is more than playable without Upscaling at 4K. Starfield is playable without Upscaling, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. Forspoken, Returnal, Chernobylite, and Dying Light 2 are also playable without Upscaling. Cyberpunk 2077 is right on the border, turning on DLSS Upscaling may be preferred.
When it comes to Ray Tracing, however, this is where performance jumps into unplayable territory for most games at 4K with the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER. You are going to need to enable Quality DLSS at the very least, in most games, and in a few even Balanced DLSS such as in Cyberpunk or Alan Wake 2 with High Ray Tracing.
When comparing the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition to the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, things become interesting. There were a lot of games where the performance or experience at 4K was similar between them, especially if you enable Upscaling. When Upscaling is used, the performance evens out between them even more. However, there are some games that have more extremes one way or the other.
We found Horizon Forbidden West heavily favors the Radeon RX 7900 XTX in performance. This game will just straight-up run better on the RX 7900 XTX without needing to enable Upscaling at 4K. Starfield was also a bit faster on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, as was Returnal and Cyberpunk 2077. Where the Radeon RX 7900 XTX fell flat was in Ray Tracing performance, the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER was faster if you wish to use Ray Tracing in games.
We were also impressed with the power draw on the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition. Either through better binning or other reasons, our GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition consumed less power than the GeForce RTX 4080, and this was with higher shader counts, clocks, and memory clock. It is impressive, to get those single-digit performance uplifts, but utilize less power doing it.
Final Points
The performance summary for the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition can be summed up simply, it provides the same gameplay performance and experience as the GeForce RTX 4080. While it has a 5% increase in CUDA Cores, a 5% increase in Tensor Cores, a 2% boost in clock speed, a 3% increase in memory clock, and a 3% increase in memory bandwidth, in terms of actual gameplay performance increase it’s between 1-3% over the GeForce RTX 4080.
The main goal, and point, of the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is to fix the pricing on the GeForce RTX 4080 and bring it down to what it should have been at the start, $999. With this new price point, and basically the same performance as the GeForce RTX 4080, the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is the 4080 Done Right, finally.
Discussion (15 replies)
Join Discussion →I recently gave in to getting a Zotac Amp Aero Extreme OC version of this. Loving it so far and have mostly had identical experiences with it but so far only had a few hours of playtime and testing this past Sunday. I was lucky enough to find one on Amazon for $1150 plus tax and free shipping. I'm also impressed with its power efficiency. I totally agree, the 4080 done right.
While I think its a great card, its still overpriced IMO.
It's only overpriced if they can keep it in stock...
Well, the one I got is already out of stock and the other sellers start at least $100 higher.
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oh, and I messed up on what I paid. It was $1099.
The super cards have been over msrp since they came out unless you were lucky enough to get one pretty early on. I've been pretty happy with my MSI 4080 non super which I paid under $1,000 for at the time. Got it before things got crazy again with the GPU market again.
There've been some ups and downs with them. I've been checking somewhat regularly since the 4070 Ti Super launched because I knew I wanted to upgrade that rig. The one that I've never seen at MSRP is what Brent reviewed, the Founders Edition, but only having one or two official sources for that makes it incredibly difficult to get.
I forget who, but someone mentioned in another thread that B&H has had some AIB cards at MSRP, PNY I think, and I almost ordered one from them. Newegg has some but you usually have to get them in a PSU combo and there are some decent combos (saw a MSI Suprim X 4080 Super and 1300W ATX 3.0 for ~$1300) but I really don't need a new PSU right now but I almost pulled the trigger on that one. I ultimately reminded myself how this was really a splurge and to stick to a budget that started in the 900-1000 range.
It's a shame though, yeah, anyone wanting to get one at MSRP still has to put in the time to look around. They can be found and some days are easier than others but persistence is key for those who want to save money. The only reason I didn't go with the 4070 Ti Super, and I've absolutely found some at $799, is that it would be a wash with the 3090 Ti I replaced while the 4080 Super is ~10% improvement, and more when factoring in DLSS 3 options. That combined with significantly less power usage and better cooling vs the 3090 Ti was enough to convince me for this card and I'm definitely happy.
Just did a quick search at NVIDIA and yep, no sign of the founders edition but there are two other models at MSRP.
Just to add that I've been pleasantly surprised with the 4090 FE card I have. This is my first FE card and so far it has run the coolest out of the three 4090's I have owned.
I almost grabbed the MSI Expert version of the 4080 Super because it's more-or-less a clone of the FE and accessible but I wanted to try the strategy of an even bigger heatsink for more passive cooling. Having heard of the energy efficiency of the 4080 Super I was curious about that strategy but as your experience and Brent's review shows, the FEs are usually awesome. I'm pretty happy with the Zotac though, it boosts to 2685 MHz at stock and I can't hear it above the AIO/case fans which are all pretty quiet most of the time.
I don't think Zotac gets enough appreciation in the hardware community. I have used them off and on going back to I believe was a 9800GT card that lasted for years.
They're just not as focused on NA as the standard gamut of GPU vendors. Believe they're bigger in EU.
I've had folks telling me for about a decade that they make good cards at great prices but the name is what held me back. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but its just not one that makes me think, yeah I need a Zotac to get the job done. However, I'm somewhat converted now, at least on the affordable side of things for OC model.
I only had one Zotac card as they are hard to come by here, it was a Geforce 4 Ti 4200, it OCed past my brothers Ti 4600, really good performance at the time.
I didn't know, or at least remember, they'd been around that long. They didn't get on my radar until around the 700 or 900 series.
They're part of the Olde Garde.
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