GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Review: Chasing RTX 4090, For Under $1K

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on an ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and 32GB of G.SKILL DDR5 RAM clocked at 6,000MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use and enabled Resizable BAR support. We dialed in memory clock to its optimal performance settings using its EXPO profile, then formatted the solid state drive and installed Windows 11 Professional before performing all updates. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (4.2GHz - 5GHz, 8-Core) ASUS X670E Hero  32GB G.SKILL DDR5-6000 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio / Network Radeon RX 7900 XT Radeon RX 7800 XT Radeon RX 7900 XTX GeForce RTX 4070 Super GeForce RTX 4070 Ti ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super GeForce RTX 4080 GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GeForce RTX 4090 Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon v23.12.1 NVIDIA Drivers v551.15

Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v4 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v3.6.1 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition Forspoken Returnal Cyberpunk 2077 Far Cry 6 GOTY Edition F1 23 Guardians Of The Galaxy

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

Once again the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER slightly outpaces the original 4080, with both models. The deltas separating the two cards are relatively small, though. Versus the Radeons, however, it's a different story. The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER significantly outpaces the Radeons in this benchmark.

Blender v4 GPU Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation, through simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing or game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmark tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...

As we've mentioned many times in the past, Blender is somewhat of a showcase application for NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. Blender can make use of the RT cores on NVIDIA's GPUs through the OptiX ray tracing rendering engine, and as a result, performance is much higher than any competing GPU in a similar class. The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER notches another victory over its namesake, and dang the RTX 4090 is a beast.

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results

The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.


The media block with 5th Gen NVDEC engine shines here, once again allowing the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER to notch a second place victory, trailing only the flagship GeForce RTX 4090.