The GeForce RTX 4090 heralded Nvidia’s new GPU generation with drums and trumpets. The RTX 4080, which will follow next month, will not only go down steeply in terms of price, but also in terms of performance. This is what benchmarks published by Nvidia itself say.
In three games, tested on a Core i9-12900K at 4K resolution and once with and once without DLSS, Nvidia compares the performance of the new and old generation. There is a huge gap between the two RTX 4080 models and the extremely fast flagship RTX 4090 (test).
RTX 4080 with 12 GB hardly faster than predecessor (without DLSS)
VideoCardz has the values of the three official Nvidia diagrams normalized and the percentage differences in performance without DLSS transferred to a separate diagram. According to this, the RTX 4080 with 12 GB in the game A Plague Tale: Requiem is only 10 percent faster than an RTX 3080. After all, the lead in Microsoft Flight Simulator is 18 percent and 20 percent in the racing game F1 22, the only one in which ray tracing was activated. Only with activated DLSS does the RTX 4080 12 GB also beat an RTX 3090 Ti in all three titles.
The RTX 4080 with 16 GB manages this even without DLSS, which, depending on the title, works 24 to 30 percent faster than the sister model with 12 GB. The GeForce RTX 4090 floats in completely different spheres, which the RTX 4080 with 16 GB GDDR6X only comes closer to in the flight simulator.
It is not surprising that the performance difference between the RTX 4080 16 GB and the RTX 4080 12 GB is so large. The faster variant has a variant of the AD103 GPU with 9,728 shader units, which is around 27 percent more than the 7,680 units of the 12 GB version with the AD104 chip. It also offers 33 percent more memory and an equally faster memory connection (256-bit vs. 192-bit). The 100 MHz lower clock, on the other hand, is not significant.
On the other hand, the RTX 4080 with 12 GB costs 1,099 euros, which is 25 percent less than the 16 GB model for 1,469 euros. Nvidia has not yet revealed exactly when the market launch will take place in November.