Overall and Final Verdict
With all of our testing out of the way and having taken a closer look at the card Nvidia’s RTX 4080, Founders Edition shows once again just how capable their new Ada architecture is. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition consistently came in second across our charts behind the RTX 4090 while having 40% fewer CUDA cores. This shows just how ludicrous the RTX 4090 is, but it is also impressive that with that 40% drop the performance was only 25% less. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition has the same cooler design as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition which does mean that it has the same huge card size, but this also translated to surprisingly good cooling performance. On top of that, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition was quiet, especially when under load. The Founders Edition all metal construction is there as always and I still think this is the best looking card design on the market.
For performance, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition dwarfed the 3000 Series cards including the RTX 3090 Ti beating it by 16% in game and even more in tests like 3DMark and putting an even bigger lead on the RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti which is what the RTX 4080 is replacing. That is all before we even figure in DLSS 3 performance which while only available in 10 games offers an impressive way to increase performance, especially in CPU-limited situations like Microsoft Flight Simulator. As far as downsides to the RTX 4080 Founders Edition, like with the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, the large card size is going to make things tough to fit in a lot of cases. But having the new 12VHPWR connection facing directly up on top adds to that, especially considering most people will have to run the included adapter until more power supplies that come with the cable are available.
For pricing the RTX 4080 Founders Edition has an MSRP of $1199 which matches the launch price of the RTX 3080 Ti which dropped in the middle of the crazy GPU pricing. With that settling down now, the $1199 price does come off as expensive especially when we compare it with the launch price of the original RTX 3080 of $699. Given just how crazy the performance of the RTX 4090 was, the RTX 4080 does offer still very capable high-end 4k performance at a lower price. So while I wouldn’t consider it to be a value, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition does have impressive performance and right now at least is the cheapest way to buy into DLSS 3 as well.
Live Pricing: HERE
