Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super – Review

When Nvidia launched GeForce RTX 4080 back in November 2022, it had been almost as expensive as the RTX 4090, but considerably slower. Now, Nvidia has launched the RTX 4080 Super to replace it, which is actually cheaper and comes with better specifications.

The price

The original 4080 was launched at a price of $1,199, while the RTX 4080 Super comes with a price tag of $999. However, it is still more expensive than the RTX 3080 that was launched for $699 in 2020. The new price is a lot more acceptable than its predecessor.

Specs and design

Similar to the other graphics cards in the RTX 4,000 series, the Ada Lovelace graphics microarchitecture has been used for developing the RTX 4080 Super, which is based on the 4nm process and boasts third-generation RT cores for ray tracing and fourth-generation Turing cores for AI acceleration. There are also 80 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) in the RTX 4080 Super that combine to offer a total of 320 Tensor cores, 10,240 CUDA cores and 80 RT cores.

This is a 5% increase in silicon as compared to the RTX 4080, but it comes with the same 16GB of VRAM on a 256-bit bus. Essentially, it means that you get four more SMs for $200 less. The Founder’s Edition of the RTX 4080 Super is a triple-slot card and needs a 3 PCIe 8-pin cable, or PCIe gen 5 cable. The good thing about the RTX 4080 Super is that even though Nvidia has added even more hardware into it, but it does not need more power to run.

In addition, it also comes with the same array of display outputs as the other high-end cards in the RTX 4000 series. There is one HDMI and three DisplayPort.

Features and software

Since Nvidia launched DLSS six years ago with the RTX 2080, the technology has only improved. The RTX 4000s use DLSS 3.0 can upscale your lower resolution game back up to native resolution. It also comes with Frame Generation that reads motion and image data from the game through the AI-accelerating Tensor Cores for generating new frames. This can drastically improve your frame rate. While it is not perfect, the feature is certainly a nice one that is not offered by a graphics card of any brand.

Performance

Similar to the original RTX 4080, the RTX 4080 Super is a 4K graphics card. It excels at that resolution, especially if you use the DLSS. But, even though it offers excellent performance, it is important to note that it is not different from what the RTX 4080 had to offer. It does give a 5% increase in performance and that too at a lower price tag. Nonetheless, it still does not come close to the performance that the RTX 4090 is capable of delivering, which makes it better value for money.