Think of the GeForce RTX 4080 Super as simply an RTX 4080 with better pricing. There’s honestly no reason to get any of the existing RTX 4080s in the market now that the 4080 Super is out. There’s barely any performance gains with the RTX 4080 Super. We are looking at anywhere from 0.4 to 1.4 per cent improvement in performance over the RTX 4080 which is within the margin of error for a lot of consumers. At the end of the day, you’re getting a slightly tweaked RTX 4080 with great pricing. What would really have been better was if this was based on the AD102 chip that the RTX 4090 is based on. That way, we’d have something more to talk about.
Excited to check out the replacement for the RTX 4080? We’re in the same boat then! We received the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Trinity Black Edition 16GB GDDR6X Graphics Card and aside from the name being a mouthful, even the performance isn’t something you’d ignore. We’d previously seen the RTX 4070 Super which ended up a pretty decent launch to begin with and had found its place in the stack at a suitable price point primarily thanks to the older RTX 4070 Ti being rendered end-of-life (EOL). It’s the same case with the GeForce RTX 4080 Super because the RTX 4080 has also been retired.
That being said, we welcome this new GPU because it’s a sign of a changing trendline with the prices. The RTX 4070 Super not only had more performance than the card it replaced but was also priced cheaper. With the RTX 4080 Super, we see the same thing. It was launched with a price of USD 999 (India price – INR 1,05,000) and replaces the RTX 4080 which was launched at USD 1,199. That’s a good USD 200 cheaper and with more performance. NVIDIA’s fiscal earnings for the consumer GPUs announced in February 2023 had dropped by 46 per cent thanks to the nasty pricing for the high-end cards in the RTX 40 series and these new GPUs are a way of compensating for that. The consumer revenues are but a small portion of their overall revenues which are dominated by the data centre AI cards but it’s still a lot of money. Thanks to the launch of the mainstream RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti cards, their earnings from the consumer cards has recovered a come up to 2.49 billion and it’s only bound to increase because the newly launched RTX 4070 Super, 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super are priced much better. Although, it will be a while before we see the impact of these cards since they are enthusiast cards which sell very little compared to the mainstream cards but have higher margins. Nevertheless, we can now expect NVIDIA to price the RTX 50-series cards more sensibly. Vote with your wallets people!
The RTX 4080 SUPER uses an AD103 GPU but I’d like to believe that it is not the absolute top-end variant since it also has the same 7 GPCs that the RTX 4080 had. It’s just that there are more SMs that are functional on the GeForce RTX 4080 Super giving it a slight advantage over the RTX 4080. Speaking of SMs, the 4080 Super has 80 Streaming Multiprocessors and 10240 CUDA Cores. Its shader performance stands at 52 FLOPs which is 7.14 per cent higher than the RTX 4080. That’s going to give a decent bump in synthetic benchmarks but when it comes to real-world gaming benchmarks, we’re going to see a more muted difference. The 320 Tensor Cores with 836 AI TOPS makes it a great card for making the most of AI-enhanced features in games and other AI-driven tasks. Since we’ve got 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on board, the card’s AI-crunching capabilities can really be put to task. Then we’ve got 80 RT Cores, which over the 76 RT Core of the 4080, isn’t going to lead to much difference. .
So, you can see why the RTX 4080 no longer had a place, even from the perspective of the raw specifications. I doubt that we’re going to see a big performance bump either. The RTX 4080 SUPER’s boost clock of 2550 MHz is good to see but the memory clocks and bus-width isn’t that different from the RTX 4080 either. There’s very little scope for the RTX 4080 Super to dramatically outperform the RTX 4080. If you were expecting the GeForce RTX 4080 Super to lie mid-way between the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090, then you’re in for a disappointment. It’s not specced or priced that way. Essentially, we’re looking at a polished RTX 4080.
The card is being compared against only the recently re-tested graphics cards and not any of the older graphics cards that are no longer available with us. Here’s the rig it was tested on.
TEST RIG
Processor – Intel Core i9 14900K
CPU Cooler – AORUS WATERFORCE X II 360
Motherboard – GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER X
RAM – 2x 16 GB Kingston Renegade FURY 6000 MT/s (Set to 5200 MT/s)
SSD – Lexar NM760 1 TB NVMe SSD
PSU – Cooler Master MWE 850 V2 Gold
We’re starting off with gaming performance in video games without RTX enabled. All of these FPS numbers are at 1440p resolution.
Peak temperatures of the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 4080 Super is pretty good and in line with most of the AIC numbers we’ve seen. Peak temps were mostly hovering around 68 degrees Celsius during gaming. Only the intensive synthetic benchmarks were able to take it up any further. Every card is hovering around 70 degrees Celsius under gaming load and the ZOTAC card is doing a good job here with its triple-fan cooling setup.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super is already available for sale. Some folks in mainland China have already procured retail samples of the card. Listing have already gone up on Indian retail stores earlier today. The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Trinity Black Edition is currently retailing for INR 1,16,875 which is one of the cheapest RTX 4080 Supers we’ve seen so far. The most expensive happens to be a white ROG Strix card from ASUS that’s selling for INR 1,68,126. So the ZOTAC card that we have here is a pretty great buy. The suggested price for the RTX 4080 Super by NVIDIA is INR 1,05,000 and the ZOTAC card isn’t exorbitantly priced at all. In fact, for the great warranty programme that ZOTAC has for their cards, this is totally a great pricing.
Think of the GeForce RTX 4080 Super as simply an RTX 4080 with better pricing. There’s honestly no reason to get any of the existing RTX 4080s in the market now that the 4080 Super is out. There’s barely any performance gains with the RTX 4080 Super. We are looking at anywhere from 0.4 to 1.4 per cent improvement in performance over the RTX 4080 which is within the margin of error for a lot of consumers. At the end of the day, you’re getting a slightly tweaked RTX 4080 with great pricing. What would really have been better was if this was based on the AD102 chip that the RTX 4090 is based on. That way, we’d have something more to talk about.
