Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080 & 2080 Ti – RTX 30 series offers a bigger performance leap than GTX 980 to 1080

Hype for the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 is massive right now. This could be the best GPU release from Nvidia in years and will no doubt AMD will be worried.

Currently, it is speculated that AMD will announce their Big Navi GPUs on or near the 7th of October, likely just before the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 launches that month. That may give us some idea on what sort of performance to expect from AMD, likely wanting to compete with or better the RTX 3070.

Lots of big claims have been made about the new RTX 30-series, including the RTX 3070 being better than the RTX 2080 Ti. At £469 it will no doubt be the most popular card for gamers offering more than enough performance for sub-4K gaming at high refresh rates with ray tracing on.

With the RTX 3090 priced at around £1400, it is being positioned more as a RTX Titan replacement, leaving the RTX 3080 as the most sensible choice for enthusiast gamers wanting the best performance possible.

Recently, Eurogamer managed to snag some exclusive access to test the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 giving us some idea of the performance gains to be had. The results are impressive to say the least.

With this being exclusive access granted by Nvidia, they had to conform to lots of rules, including the games testing and the settings used. So, the likelihood these are all best-case scenario to make the cards look as good as possible.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080ti Specification Comparison

  RTX 3090 RTX 3080 RTX 3070 RTX 2080 Ti
CUDA Cores 10496 8704 5888 4352
Base Clock 1.40GHz 1.44GHz 1.50GHz 1.35GHz
Boost Clock 1.7GHz 1.71GHz 1.73GHz 1545MHz
Memory Clock 19.5Gbps GDDR6X 19Gbps GDDR6X 16Gbps GDDR6 14Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus Width 384-bit 320-bit 256-bit 352-bit
VRAM 24GB 10GB 8GB 11GB
Single Precision Perf. 35.7 TFLOPs 29.8 TFLOPs 20.4 TFLOPs 13.4 TFLOPs
Tensor Perf. (FP16) 285 TFLOPs 238 TFLOPs 163 TFLOPs 114 TFLOPs
Ray Perf. 69 TFLOPs 58 TFLOPs 40 TFLOPs ?
TDP 350W 320W 220W 250W
GPU GA102? GA102? GA104? TU102
Transistor Count 28B 28B ? 18.6B
PCIe Interface 4.0 x16 4.0 x16 4.0 x16 3.0 x16
Architecture Ampere Ampere Ampere Turing
Manufacturing Process Samsung 8nm Samsung 8nm Samsung 8nm TSMC 12nm FFN
Launch Date 24th September 17th of September October 2020 20th September 2018
Launch Price MSRP: $1499/£1399 MSRP: $699/£649 MSRP: $499/£469 MSRP: $999

Using the previous table I posted, we can see that the RTX 3080, on paper, offers a significantly improved specification compared to last years flagship GPU, the RTX 2080ti.

While the 10GB memory is slightly less, the number of CUDA cores has doubled base and boose frequencies have increased considerably and the GDDR6X offers higher bandwidth. Compared to the RTX 2080 with 2944 CUDA cores you get a 195% improvement.

For single-precision performance in teraflops, we see a 122% improvement going from 13.4 TFLOPs to 29.8 TFLOPs. Compared to the RTX 2080 with 10.1 TFLOPs that’s a 195% improvement.

For tensor performance (FP16) the numbers are almost as impressive with a 108% improvement over the RTX 2080Ti.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080 & 2080 Ti – RTX 30 series offers a bigger performance leap than GTX 980 to 1080 4
From Nvdia

Gaming Results – RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080

RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080 4K/Max Settings Perf Boost
Borderlands 3 81.6
Doom Eternal 84.2
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 69.8
Control 77.6
Ray Tracing: Quake 2 RTX 92.3
Ray Tracing: Control/High RT/DLSS Perf 77.6

Due to the conditions EuroGamer were given I would assume all these figures are the more positive results that are achievable by the cards. We will have to wait and see what results are achieved across multiple games at different settings to get a real idea of how good these are.

However, those are some impressive numbers, with the worst result being a 69.8% improvement moving from the GeForce RTX 2080 to RTX 3080.

With Ray Tracing in Quake 2, the 2x improvement that NVIDA claim is almost accurate with a 92.3% improvement in the results achieved.

It already looks like the RTX 3070 may beat the RTX 2080 Ti in some, if not many games. So with the RTX 3080 I would be hopeful that this can easily beat the RTX 2080 Ti in almost anything, which is amazing considering the pricing.

Pricing

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 has a launch price of $699/£649 and will be available on the 17th of September.

Currently the cheapest GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on Scan is £1,054.99, the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER can be had for the same price as the RRP of the RTX 3080 starting at £649.79.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti eBay Pricing

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 vs RTX 2080 & 2080 Ti – RTX 30 series offers a bigger performance leap than GTX 980 to 1080 5

This has led to RTX 2080 Ti to crash in pricing on eBay, but if the performance of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 is accurate, there is little reason to buy one.

The cheapest I can find, pre-owned buy it now is £550 for an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with no box with a broken warranty seal as it was water cooled.

Then there is a MSI GeForce RTX 2080ti Gaming X Trio also at £550 which includes the box but lacks a support bracket.

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