NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

NVIDIA announced the Ampere-based Geforce cards earlier this month and given the feedback we’ve been receiving from social media, it’s obvious are hyped about this product. Jensen Huang came out with a brief presentation, demonstrating the performance improvement that Ampere brings to the table. Building on what the Turing-based RTX 20 series did in 2018, the RTX 30 series of graphics cards will continue in that direction, focusing on raytracing as well as DLSS to help improve performance raytraced games and application even further.

And that has been the silent noise in the background during the build-up for this launch. NVIDIA promises twice the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti or more at less cost which sent shockwaves to the current market with users already panicking to sell their RTX 20 series graphics cards. Still, the noise rings on: do we really get twice the performance of the previous generation?

Today the veil lifts as reviews for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition goes live. As the debut card for the RTX 30 series, NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series card is not only armed with the latest 8nm Ampere GPU forged by Samsung baked into a compact new PCB designed exclusively for the Founders Edition, the first custom card out the gate, the template at which AICs should strive for. Featuring a flow-thru design, the new reference card features a radical new approach to cooling which is certainly quite the take but also presents some questions. And speaking of questions, much like you we want these answered but with the global situation right now, that has proven quite problematic as NVIDIA has pushed this launch later than previously stated.

With that being said, this is an incomplete review. I will present to you my standard gaming tests that has consumed the 7 days that I had to test this card along with 9 other GPUs to provide an updated comparative data for today’s testing but with the findings we had during these tests, it must be stressed that there’s certainly a lot lacking to prove this review complete. Still, my gaming test suite is complete and it is my standard gauntlet so as not to waste your time any further we’ll skip all the technical details and jump straight to testing.

In this review, we’ll pit the RTX 3080 head-to-head against the RTX 2080 Ti and a few other RTX 20 series cards plus a custom RX 5700 XT to see where the RTX 3080 stands.