Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 boosts as high as the RTX 4090 while consuming a lot less power

Some more Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 benchmarks have emerged online, just a day after the graphics card made its Geekbench and Blender debut. This time, one gets to see the Ada Lovelace card flex its muscles a little, giving us a better idea about how it'll stand against the GeForce RTX 4090 and potentially, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. It shouldn't be long before we find out, though, because the RTX 4080 will be available on November 16.

Twitter leaker @Zed__Wang, the same person who first talked about the existence of two GeForce RTX 4080 variants, has now posted some gaming and synthetic benchmarks of the graphics card. It scores 28,599 and 14,178 points in the 3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme, respectively. The latter is an improvement over its previous run, where it scored 13,977. @Harukaze5719 drew a helpful graph showing where the GeForce RTX 4080 stands in the grand scheme, which is anywhere between 24% and 37% slower than the RTX 4090.

The differences between the two Ada Lovelace bigwigs are even less apparent in the Forza Horizon 5 benchmark. The GeForce RTX 4080 outputted an average of 117 frames per second at 4K, with everything cranked all the way up. The GeForce RTX 4090 averaged 137 frames per second in the same environment. It is important to note that both graphics cards are running different drivers, presumably due to the RTX 4080 not being officially supported yet. The CPU in question is an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. While it is a competent performer in its own right, a higher-end Zen 4 or Raptor Lake processor would have been ideal as it would eliminate the possibilities of any CPU bottlenecks.

Pre-launch leaks predicted Ada Lovelace graphics cards could easily breeze past the 3.0 GHz barrier thanks to its TSMC N4 silicon. The GeForce RTX 4090 has demonstrated its ability to do so a few times, but it comes at a tremendous power cost. Surprisingly, the GeForce RTX 4080 gets within spitting distance (2,910 MHz) while consuming only 320 Watts of power; exactly how much it was designed to. The best part is, there was no overclocking involved and the card was supposedly run with stock settings. Whether or not it is a case of pure luck remains to be seen.

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