NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition Review

A little faster, a lot cheaper

I will begin this review with a rant. A rant about the original GeForce RTX 4080, and its list price.

At $1199 USD the GeForce RTX 4080 was a product that perfectly illustrated everything wrong with the PC enthusiast hobby, today. Namely, that GPUs cost too damn much. As a product, it was fine. It’s a really good GPU, and a lot faster than the RTX 3080 it effectively replaces. However, in the GeForce RTX 40 Series lineup it was so far behind the RTX 4090 in performance that the $400 disparity in price (theoretically the RTX 4090 is $1599 USD) didn’t make a lot of sense. Or maybe it’s just me? Am I insane?

Speaking of insanity, I’m actually just fine with crazy expensive, ultra high-end products. There’s a market for them. Make a 40 Series TITAN and price it at $2500, and the affluent among us – and top YouTubers – will bask in its high-performance glow. But offering a cut-down AD103 for $1199 was so unbelievable, so dastardly, that it … didn’t harm NVIDIA in the least.. Sure, the RTX 3080 was $699, and a $1199 price for the RTX 4080 represented a $500 gen-on-gen increase, but AMD didn’t exactly take over the high-end market with RDNA 3.

But the RTX 4080 must not have been selling all that well, either, or there would be no need for a price cut now. Or maybe NVIDIA just wants to foster some of that gamer good will, right Josh?

The lighter one is the original RTX 4080 FE

Here’s a look at the top of the RTX 40 Series lineup, with the original RTX 4080 back in there for comparison purposes:

I think it’s pretty safe to say that there’s room in the lineup for an AD102-based RTX 4080 Ti. Look at the disparity between even the new RTX 4080 SUPER and the RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 is beast – but in fairness to the 4080 SUPER it is an absolutely ridiculous card and so much more expensive that we shouldn’t focus on it today.

No, this launch is about a faster RTX 4080. An RTX 4080 with a fully-enabled AD103 and the fastest GDDR6X that we’ve ever seen. This configuration takes us (compared to the original RTX 4080) from 76 to 80 SMs, increases memory bandwidth from 717 GB/s to 736 GB/s, and boosts clock speeds slightly (90 MHz higher Base, 45 MHz higher Boost) for good measure.

The Founders Edition Card

Unlike the GeForce RTX Ti SUPER launch, which featured an ASUS TUF Gaming design, we have once again an NVIDIA Founders Edition card for this launch. This card is easily distinguished from its non-SUPER predecessor thanks to the black finish on the metal frame, and in no other obvious way.

We will not dwell on card design, since this is just a jet black version of the same card we looked at in November of 2022. Expect high clocks, excellent temps, and that top-mounted 12VHPWR experience of the original.

Performance

With a product like this, you know the benchmarks are going to be a little underwhelming. Sure, there will be instances where the added cores and faster memory will provide a noticeable boost compared to the original card, but don’t expect miracles from the RTX 4080 SUPER. This launch is more about the $200 lower price than anything.

Let’s look at some charts.

Averaging three runs (as always for GPU benchmarks) we find a 382 point margin of victory for the RTX 4080 SUPER over its non-SUPER predecessor in 3DMark Speed Way, which is an increase of 5% in this challenging DX12 Ultimate test.

The RTX 4080 SUPER’s advantage is smaller in this standard DX12 (rasterized) benchmark, with the 470 point difference in Time Spy Extreme a 3% increase over the original RTX 4080.

Next, we will look at a few game benchmarks.

The RTX 4080 SUPER is just barely faster in this non-ray traced instance of Cyberpunk 2077, coming in a whopping 1.4% faster than the original RTX 4080 at these settings.

In Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, run at the maximum “Extreme” preset, the RTX 4080 SUPER is back up to 3% faster than the original RTX 4080.

Some people think that Far Cry 6 is only used by hardware reviewers, but I’m sure dozens of people play this game every week. That being said, it really doesn’t like GeForce GPUs, and this new RTX 4080 SUPER is no exception. Just look at that nearly 1 FPS advantage over the original RTX 4080. That’s an advantage of just over 0.6% !!

Ok, back to something a little more DX12 Ultimate-y.

Well, that 2.1 FPS advantage may not be very noticeable, but are you really going to complain about a 2% performance boost in your favorite game about F1 in the year 2022 when you’re actually paying $200 less for the privilege? Exactly.

Now for the RTX 40 Series bread and butter: DLSS with Frame Generation. Below is just one game benchmark, Cyberpunk 2077 at the RT Ultra preset, but it serves to demonstrate the feature between the most powerful cards on test today. For NVIDIA GPUs we have DLSS at the Quality level, and for the two Radeon cards we have FSR 2.1 at the Quality level as well.

Please note that new testing using Fluid Motion Frames is needed for the Radeon cards, so Frame Gen is simply an NVIDIA comparison in the chart below:

The RTX 4080 and 4080 SUPER are really close, again, in this test. Even in this ray traced test with DLSS, we are talking about a 3 FPS boost for the SUPER version – with or without Frame Gen enabled. So, did I mention that the RTX 4080 SUPER is $200 less than the original RTX 4080? That’s a 16.7% decrease in price, which makes the ~3% (theoretically up to 5%) performance increase just icing on the cake.

Next, we will look at power draw from this Founders Edition card:

The card is rated for 320 watts total power, and we measured this during a run of 3DMark Speed Way using the PCAT hardware passthrough equipment for real-time measurements of both PCI-E and slot power. Average load power was 315.2 watts during this run, with the highest recorded spike reaching 368.1 watts. There were a number of spikes above the rated power, as follows:

• 10 data points at or above 360 W
• 22 data points at or above 350 W
• 40 data points at or above 340 W
• 67 data points at or above 330 W

Idle power continues excellent with RTX 40 Series cards, with readings from just 12.5 watts, and most data points well under 20 watts.

Conclusion

There you have it, another SUPER launch is in the books, and we have a very slight performance edge over the original version of the card. When comparing the new RTX 40 Series SUPER cards, by far this is the smallest performance uplift compared to the original. HOWEVER, this card is nearly 17% less expensive than the version it is replacing. When does this ever happen?

I’m sure top YouTubers are already out there with their pensive, disapproving, disappointed, or pseudo-angry face thumbnails just killing the low single-digit increases with the RTX 4080 SUPER over its non-SUPER predecessor, but to me this launch is All About the Benjamins. All two of them, as a matter of fact. Yes, for $200 United States Dollars less than the original card, you have a new card that’s just a little faster.

The End.