That leaves three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1 port. The port selection here has also changed slightly, with the rather useful USB-C VirtualLink port excised in the face of minimal industry uptake. Therefore, we're sticking with PCIe 3.0 - at least for our initial testing. However, we got fractionally higher frame-rates at 4K running the 3080 on our Core i9 10900K test bench, which is limited to PCIe 3.0, and consistently faster performance at 1080p and 1440p. That should allow for slightly less restricted performance in some scenarios, and indeed we saw slightly higher frame-rates in Horizon Zero Dawn at 4K (around +4fps) when moving from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 - that's with a Ryzen 9 3950X processor on an X570 motherboard. The bottom of the card is home to the PCIe connector, as usual, but this is Nvidia's first card to support the new PCIe 4.0 standard. While some power supply manufacturers have already released custom 12-pin cables for their higher-end modular PSUs, don't worry about that right away: you'll get a dual eight-pin to 12-pin adapter in the box that will do the job. As well as being physically smaller, this connector is also capable of delivering much more power - which is key for this card, as we'll see later. There's not quite enough room here for the normal pair of eight-pin connectors you'd expect, so instead the firm has implemented a more compact 12-pin port. Instead, Nvidia has slotted it into the middle of the unit, at the furthest reaches of the PCB. That means there's actually no place to stick a power input where you'd normally expect to find it, at the back end of the card. The PCB has also shrunk substantially, with the entire back half of the card devoted to fins and heat pipes. It'll be interesting to see whether it represents a significant advantage over custom cards once the embargo for these reviews has lifted. In our testing, the RTX 3080's Founders Edition cooler performed well, given the level of power and performance on display. This should improve temperatures at a given fan speed, but it might also push hot air onto the CPU more than you'd expect from a traditional design - something to keep in mind if you're using an air cooler rather than an AiO or custom water cooling. We still have a pair of fans, as we saw on 20-series cards, but they're now in a push-pull configuration with one fan on each side - something Nvidia calls 'flow-through'.
While there's plenty happening under the hood, one of the first things you'll notice about the RTX 3080 is its unusual thermal solution. Everything you need to know about the RTX 3080, including those all-important performance figures. In short, pretty much everything here has been pushed to the limits for maximum performance, with Nvidia in many cases literally doubling down on the hardware responsible for RTX and AI-accelerated workloads.
Nvidia is also working with next-generation versions of its ray tracing and tensor cores, all the better for improving in an area that clearly demands extra grunt. The card's memory has also been upgraded, with 10GB of GDDR6X memory that's more power-efficient than its GDDR6 predecessor to allow for higher frequencies and more bandwidth. That allows Nvidia to pack in many more transistors than ever before, boosting performance and power efficiency. Nvidia has claimed that it'll deliver twice the ray tracing performance and the biggest generational leap ever, and that's largely down to the die shrink from a 12nm process to an 8nm process, delivered courtesy of Samsung rather than usual fab, TSMC. Now, the gloves are off and we can share a more complete picture of RTX 3080 performance, all the way from 1080p and 1440p to 4K in a much wider range of titles.īefore we get into the benchmarks, it's worth covering the makeup of this new Ampere card.
Thankfully, it's a cracker - we already shared some preliminary data that revealed impressive boosts to 4K performance over the outgoing RTX 2080 - but that was with Nvidia choosing the games and resolution. The new Ampere line includes three confirmed cards and should eventually swell to a lineup of at least a half-dozen, if past series are anything to go by, but in the here and now we have just one: the RTX 3080. A new generation of Nvidia GeForce graphics cards has finally arrived.
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