NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE Video Card Review – Ampere
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The performance gains from the new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 is nothing short of incredible. NVIDIA promised massive performance gains over last-generation Turing cards and they delivered. The real interest for this series will likely be with those that are still running Pascal-based cards in the GeForce GTX 10-series. You know, the gamers that wanted to skip 1st gen RTX cards no matter what. Well, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 that was introduced in 2016 gets lapped by the GeForce RTX 3080!
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is the fastest graphics card that we have ever tested and it only costs $699. We say only as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition launched at $1199 and this card is launching at $699. This just happens to be the same launch price at the GeForce RTX 2080 and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. You get so much more performance with this card it isn’t funny. We often were getting 60-80% more performance than the RTX 2080 with the RTX 3080, so owners of the RTX 2080 might even be wanting to upgrade now. Need a nudge? If you bought an RTX 2080 card at launch it is likely over two years old and there is just one year left on the AIB partner warranty. You can buy a new card and get the better performance and another full warranty term.
What are the negatives? The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 uses quite a bit more power than the RTX 2080. It also has just 10GB of Micron GDDR6X memory. It would have been nice to see more memory on this card, but a 10GB frame buffer is still fairly large. Those that need more memory could move up to the GeForce RTX 3090 as it has 24GB of memory. If that is out of your price range you might just want to wait it out. NVIDIA will likely introduce a 3080 SUPER or 3080 Ti model in the months ahead as there is too large of a gap between the 3080 and 3090 in both features and price. NVIDIA more than likely has something planned for that market segment, but you won’t be hearing about it for months.
At the end of the day the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is an excellent graphics card. We stuck it in our gaming PC and used it for a few days. We then put in our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti from when it launched and we noticed a big enough difference to want the RTX 3080 back on our 4K gaming system. The RTX 3080 ensures a better gaming experience and there is nothing else on the market today that can best it!
Legit Bottom Line: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is the card to have in 2020 and the $699 price tag actually feels okay for how well it performs!