Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. Right now though with this being the first RTX 4080 in the office I’m mostly curious how it compares to the RTX 4090 that was previously launched and last generations cards like the RTX 3080 Ti that it replaces.

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition came in second in all three of the Fire Strike benchmarks with its big brother the RTX 4090 being at the top of course. There is a big performance gap between them, but even still the RTX 4080 Founders Edition outperformed last year's RTX 3090 Ti by a wide margin, not to mention the 3080 Ti.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. Time Spy is 3DMark’s first DX12 benchmark and the RTX 4080 Founders Edition performed similarly here as well with the 4090 way out in front and the RTX 4080 Founders Edition way out ahead of everything from the last generation including the 3090 Ti.

The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the RTX 4080 Founders Edition came in second to the RTX 4090 once again here and the gap between the two cards, especially on the 4K result, is crazy here with the 4090 almost breaking the scaling of the graph. That said the RTX 4080 Founders Edition is still way out in front of the RTX 3090 Ti and with none of the tested AMD cards even close.