Nvidia RTX 4080 vs Nvidia RTX 3080: Is newer better?

Nvidia just announced its latest line of GPUs with the Nvidia RTX 4000 Series. Here’s how it compares to its predecessor.

Nvidia unveiled two new GPUs at its GTC 2022 Keynote, including the Nvidia RTX 4090 and Nvidia RTX 4080. This is the company’s third generation of RTX graphics cards, with plenty more updates and improvements for gamers and creatives.

Keep reading to find out how the RTX 4080 compares to its predecessor, the RTX 3080.

The RTX 4080 is a lot more expensive

While it’s expected that next-generation hardware can be more costly, the price of the latest RTX 4080 is a lot more expensive when compared to its predecessor. The RTX 4080 (16GB) starts at $1199, while the RTX 4080 (12GB) will start at $899.

Looking back to the RTX 3080, which costs only $699 (12GB) / $649 (10GB), it is definitely the better option if you’re looking to upgrade without breaking the bank. While we will touch on all of the new features the Lovelace generation is bringing, it’s important to note that you will need to spend a lot more if you’re looking to upgrade to the new graphics cards.

The RTX 4080 is 2-4x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti

Nvidia claims the RTX 4080 is 2x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti when it comes to playing games such as Flight Simulator, and around 3x faster when it comes to Portal RTX.

The performance difference will understandably be dependent on the game, but it’s still great to see such a major performance uplift compared to the preceding generation.

Nvidia hasn’t provided exact figures to compare with the standard Nvidia RTX 3080, but we’ll update this article as soon as we hear more.

The inclusion of Ada Lovelace in the latest RTX 4080 GPU means that it has the benefit of DLSS 3. DLSS is developed by Nvidia and uses AI to boost a game’s framerate performance higher, allowing you to play games at a higher frame rate without overloading your GPU.

DLSS 3 uses new AI-powered Optical Multi Frame Generation, which can generate whole high-quality frames, rather than just pixels. It feeds pixel motion data from previous frames to the DLSS neural network, ensuring that performance is boosted even in CPU-bound scenarios.

This means that gamers should be able to play supported DLSS games with even higher frame rates and more impressive graphics. DLSS 3 is not available on the RTX 3080, suggesting that it will become the inferior option for those who want the best graphical performance possible.

The Ada Lovelace GPUs now include the latest generation of ray tracing software from Nvidia, which now has twice the ray-triangle intersection output when compared to its predecessors.

According to the company, this will increase the peak RT-TFLOP performance by 2.8x, ensuring an improved performance for gamers. The company also revealed that full ray tracing will be coming to Cyperpunk 2077, showing a demo of the game using the new technology and how much it affects the graphical performance.

It also shows Cyperpunk being played with ray tracing at 96FPS, meaning that gamers will be able to take advantage of the technology without needing to run the game on a low frame rate.