NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Review: Ampere Is A Gaming Monster

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards represented in this article on an ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i9-10980XE 18-core / 36-thread processor and 32GB of HyperX DDR4 RAM clocked at 2,933MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, games, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System Intel Core i9 Powered

Hardware Used: Intel Core i9-10980XE (3GHz - 4.4GHz, 18-Core) ASUS X299 Prime (Intel X299 Chipset) 32GB Corsair DDR4-2933 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio Integrated Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE NVIDIA Titan RTX NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

Relevant Software: Windows 10 Pro x64 (v2004) AMD Radeon Software v20.8.3 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v456.16 Benchmarks Used: IndigoBench v4 LuxMark v4_alpha0 SiSoft SANDRA 2020 VRMark 3DMark (Time Spy, Fire Strike, Port Royal) Unigine Superposition Crytek Neon Noir Metro Exodus Red Dead Redemption 2 Gears Tactics Wolfenstein: Youngblood FarCry: New Dawn

SiSoft SANDRA 2020 Cryptography And Image Processing OpenCL Performance Tests

SANDRA's GPGPU Image Processing benchmark runs through an array of filters on its reference data and offers up an aggregate score, derived from a number of individual results. CUDA and OpenCL code paths are available in these tests, but we used OpenCL on all cards to keep the playing field level. Previously, using the CUDA path with NVIDIA GPUs resulted in better performance, but OpenCL actually outperforms CUDA in these tests now...

The Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 absolutely crushes every other card we tested here. It offers approximately 2.6X the performance of a GeForce RTX 2080 Super and outpaces the mighty Titan RTX by about 76%.

IndigoBench GPU Rendering Performance

The deltas separating the GeForce RTX 3080 from the other cards are smaller in IndigoBench, but the card still manages to blow past the Titan RTX and more than double the performance of AMD's current flagship Radeon GPU.

Unigine Superposition Pseudo-DirectX / OpenGL Gaming

Superposition is a relatively new benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in as well. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in two modes using the DirectX code path – 1080p Extreme and VR Future -- to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition

Unigine Superposition's 1080P Extreme test puts the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 more than 54% ahead of the GeForce RTX 2080 Super, and well out in front of the RTX 2080 Ti or Titan RTX. Again, AMD's fastest Radeon offers less than the half the performance here.


Superposition's VR Future test tells essentially the same story -- the GeForce RTX 3080 can't be touched by any current-generation GPU. Nothing from AMD comes close and the powerful Titan RTX lags behind by nearly 18%.

UL VRMark Testing Rift And Vive Readiness

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


In VR Mark, once again, we find the new GeForce RTX 3080 leading the pack by a significant margin, outrunning the GeForce RTX 2080 Super by approximately 50% and more than doubling the performance of the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT.

UL 3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 Performance

In the DX12-based 3DMark Tme Spy benchmark, the Ampere-powered GeForce RTX 3080 clearly leads the pack once again, blowing past the Titan RTX to finish well out in front of every other card we tested.

UL 3DMark Fire Strike Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

GeForce RTX 3080 Fire Strike Ultra Details

Our results in the DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark mirror what we saw in Time Spy. The GeForce RTX 3080 dominates the rest of the field, besting every other card by a wide margin.

UL 3DMark Port Royal DXR Ray Tracing Benchmark

Port Royal was released earlier this year as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable DXR, and NVIDIA is the only company to have done so at this point, hence the lack of Radeons in the chart.



The GeForce RTX 3080 puts up a Port Royal ray tracing score nearly 1.65X higher the GeForce RTX 2080 Super, and again, even beats the powerful Titan RTX by a significant margin.