NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Review: Ada Lovelace For Enthusiasts
We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. 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, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
Our Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Suprim X NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon 22.9.1 NVIDIA Drivers v526.74 |
Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 Forza Horizon 5 F1 2022 / F1 2021 A Plague Tale: Requiem Guardians Of The Galaxy Fortnite |
LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks
LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.
The new GeForce RTX 4080 series cards from NVIDIA and MSI clearly outrun the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with both of the Luxmark scenes that we tested, but they trail the more powerful GeForce RTX 4090 by a wide margin.
IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks
IndigoBench is based on Indigo 4's advanced rendering engine and offers both CPU and GPU rendering modes for its two built-in models. The standalone benchmark is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and outputs results in M/Samples per second.
The new GeForce RTX 4080 series cards also performed well in the IndigoBench rendering tests, outrunning the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and Radeon by wide margins. Once again though, the GeForce RTX 4090 was significantly faster.
Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
The new GeForce RTX 4080 series cards offered similar performance to the higher-end GeForce RTX 4090 here in the more taxing test using less compressed video. But in the 12:1 test, the deltas separating the NVIDIA and MSI GeForce RTX 4080s from the RTX 4090 was more significant.
