Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super review: Minor power increase with a major price slash

The RTX 4080 Super is slightly improved over the outgoing RTX 4080, but the real improvement isn't in the specifications. The important change is the price, with a $200 reduction on the MSRP for the newer Super variant. It replaces the RTX 4080 in the lineup and nicely slots in the middle of the prices for the RTX 4070 Super ($599) and RTX 4090 ($1,599). This is the price that the original RTX 4080 should have launched at, but it doesn't quite do enough to make this graphics card have great value.

About this review: This review was conducted using the RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition, provided by Nvidia, for the purposes of testing. Nobody at Nvidia has had any input on the content of this review.

Pricing and availability

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super FE was announced at CES on January 8, 2024. The Founders Edition (FE) card we're looking at here went on sale on January 31, 2024, at an MSRP of $999. The FE variant is available directly from Nvidia and also from Best Buy as their retail partner.

Nvidia's AIB partners have also announced a slew of customized versions of the RTX 4080 Super, which start from the same MSRP but can be significantly more expensive depending on the brand and model. The baseline RTX 4080 has been discontinued with the release of this card, so keep that in mind.

Design and features

The FE cooler gets refreshed

Nvidia made Founder's Edition designs for two of the three cards in the Super refresh. The design is mostly the same as the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, with a well-built heat sink with a flow-through air path with two fans, one on each side.

As always, Nvidia does a fantastic job with its first-party cooler designs, which are heavy due to the amount of metal used while providing great airflow for cooling. The I/O panel has a large cut-out for airflow to exhaust the case, three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a single HDMI 2.1 port, so you can run 4K monitors at 240Hz or an 8K panel at 60Hz if you have one.

If you were a fan of the black design with silver accents that Nvidia used on the other 40-series FE cards, there's a lot to like here as well. The RTX 4080 Super changes it up slightly, with black piping around as an accent instead of the sections that were silver on the outgoing card. It's a nice change for those who don't want garish designs inside their PCs, and the only lighting on this card is the GeForce RTX branding on the side, which glows white under use.

As always, Nvidia does a fantastic job with its first-party cooler designs, which are heavy due to the amount of metal used while providing great airflow for cooling.

The triple-slot cooler takes up a significant volume inside any PC chassis, so you'll want to check clearances carefully when choosing a case for your new build. Finding a full-tower case with enough space inside will be easier, but the best mid-tower cases should also work.

Even with the considerable weight of this card and its triple-slot size, it doesn't sag when installed horizontally or vertically. It's a great-looking graphics card and will suit almost any hardware you pair it with.

Performance

Chews up the most demanding games, even at 4K

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is perhaps the most incremental improvement of the three mid-cycle refresh cards. It uses the same AD103 silicon as the RTX 4080, which has 3rd-gen RT cores, 4th-gen Tensor cores, DLSS 3.5 support with Frame Generation, and the 8th-gen NVENC encoder with AV1 support. It has the same 16GB of GDDR6X VRAM as the card it replaces and the same 256-bit memory bus.

What's changed is a bump to 10,240 CUDA cores, up from 9,728 on the RTX 4080. Nvidia also increased the boost clock speed by 135 MHz, which isn't much and possibly shows the upper limits of the AD103 silicon. It also gets 112 ROPs, 320 Tensor cores, and 80 RT cores. It uses a 16-pin 12VHPWR PCIe 5 connector for power and has a 320W TDP.

If you aren't using a native 12VHPWR cable from an ATX 3.0 power supply, you'll want to set aside three PCIe cables as the included adapter uses that many and won't boot if you try to use fewer.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is perhaps the most incremental improvement of the three mid-cycle refresh cards.

I used the RTX 4080 Super FE on a test system with an Intel i9-12900K processor with 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD for the OS and games. Wherever possible, testing was done on the in-game benchmarking tools, with an in-game frame rate check to ensure it was representative of real-world performance.

I used the included adapter cable with three 8-pin PCIe power cables attached and had no power draw issues. The adapter is quite bulky and could have clearance issues if your PC case doesn't have enough depth between the motherboard and the inside of the side panel.

Regarding benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 4080 Super FE performed well in the 3DMark suite, with the tests targeting 1440p and 4K performance.

Looking closer at the 3DMark test figures, we can see the progression in Time Spy scores between the three Super variants, with the RTX 4090 thrown in for good measure. The RTX 4080 Super doesn't come close to the crown, but that's to be expected with its specifications and price point. It shows that the RTX 4080 Super is almost the mid-point between the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4090, as intended by Nvidia.

The performance of the card in synthetic benchmarks is useful for comparing different graphics cards but sometimes doesn't show up in real-world testing with games. That's not the case here, with the RTX 4080 Super putting out solid frame rates at 1080p, 1440p, and even at 4K. Performance at 4K was decent, even without DLSS and Frame Generation turned on.

The real star of the story for me is how much DLSS 3.5 and Frame Generation improved performance, with almost four times the frame rates in the notoriously hard-to-run Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty when settings were cranked to Ultra.

The real star of the story for me is how much DLSS 3.5 and Frame Generation improved performance...

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super ran everything I threw at it at 1080p, even when turning settings to their maximum. With 95FPS being the lowest frame rate in all the games tested in the system-crushing Cyberpunk 2077, the GPU was impressive in pure performance before testing with DLSS turned on.

For comparison's sake, the Zotac RTX 4070 Super we recently reviewed managed 64FPS at FHD in Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Ultra settings.

The picture was the same with one of the most demanding ray tracing titles right now, Remedy's Alan Wake 2, with 134FPS at 1080p and 102FPS at 1440p. That's plenty for smooth gaming and meant I could enjoy the lush cinematic universe created by the developers without frame rate or pacing issues marring the experience.

The thing is, the outgoing RTX 4080 has almost identical performance.

The thing is, the outgoing RTX 4080 has almost identical performance. We've tested a smaller cross-section of games and found the performance uptick between the two cards is marginal at best.

That's not to say there isn't an improvement, but when adding 5% more CUDA cores, you can only reasonably expect a performance boost to match, which is exactly what we found. It's not worth an upgrade if you already have the existing RTX 4080, but it is worth looking at if you're building a new PC or upgrading from an older card.

Temperatures and fan noise

Barely noticed it was on

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 FE was installed on an open-air test bench for this review and operated in a room with an ambient temperature of around 22 Celsius. I recorded a maximum core temperature of 58.2C, and that was only after an extended session at 4K in Cyberpunk 2077. In every other situation, the temperature was substantially lower, including being in the mid-30s while doing desktop tasks like word processing and browsing the internet.

It's a testament to Nvidia's cooling solution design that the card is whisper-quiet, even under heavy loads.

It's a testament to Nvidia's cooling solution design that the card is whisper-quiet, even under heavy loads. The fans don't have a zero-RPM mode like many AIB models, but even at full-tilt playing Cyberpunk 2077, the Noctua fans on my CPU cooler were making more noticeable noise.

That's perhaps expected, as this cooler was designed to handle the 450W output of the RTX 4090, so using it on a graphics card that only uses 320W or so means it can stay cool and quiet, making your overall PC quieter. And because it's designed to exhaust air out of the I/O area, it should perform fairly well in smaller form factor cases if you can find one in which the large size of this card can fit.

Should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super FE?

You should buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super if:

• You want a solid gaming experience at 4K resolution in ray-traced titles
• You are building a high-end PC and don't want to pay the premium for the RTX 4090
• You value low noise and temperatures from your GPU

You shouldn't buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super if:

• You don't play games at 4K resolution
• You don't want to upgrade your case to a larger one

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 FE is a powerful graphics card with an overbuilt cooling solution that keeps it quiet and cool under pressure. It has enough graphical grunt to play the most demanding titles at 4K at playable frame rates but is slightly surplus to requirements if you're gaming at 1440p or below. The only exception would be esports players, who aim for 360FPS or above when playing on fast refresh rate monitors at 1080p. With technologies like DLSS and Frame Generation, even 4K gamers can hit triple-digit frame rates, which is honestly astounding.

It has enough graphical grunt to play the most demanding titles at 4K at playable frame rates, but is slightly surplus to requirements if you're gaming at 1440p or below.

For those gamers who don't need ray tracing and want more VRAM, the AMD Radeon 7900 XT is 20% cheaper while only being 13% lower in relative performance, according to Techpowerup. AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX has even more VRAM but the same MSRP as the RTX 4080 Super while lacking in ray tracing performance and technologies like DLSS.

Overall, the GeForce RTX 4080 Super FE is a worthwhile mid-cycle refresh/reboot. It doesn't bring much additional power over the RTX 4080, but it costs considerably less if you find it at retail and somewhat redeems the card it replaces. For those who want 4K gaming with ray tracing, DLSS, and Frame Generation but don't want to pay the premium for the RTX 4090, this is the card to look at.