RTX 3090 Review – The 3080 is Too Fast

Gaming Performance and Performance Comparison between RTX 3080 and RTX 3090

It's hard to complain about gaming performance when both GPUs deliver well over 144 fps at 4k. Nvidia has clearly stated that the RTX 3080 is the gaming flagship GPU, not the RTX 3090. However, after testing both GPUs, it becomes clear why the 3090 was positioned as the gaming flagship. The results show that the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 have a small difference in pure rasterization performance, with the smallest difference being around 10 in both cases. When factoring in ray tracing and DLSS, the difference is less pronounced, but still noticeable.

The RTX 3090's advantage becomes more apparent when maxing out a game at 4k. In this scenario, both GPUs are reduced to under 60 fps, with the RTX 3090 edging over an average of 60 fps for the MSI Gaming X Trio variant of the RTX 3090. The boost clock speed for the RTX 3090 is slightly lower than that of the RTX 3080. However, this is expected, and it's clear that Nvidia has carefully designed the cooling system to keep temperatures in check.

In terms of thermal performance, the MSI Gaming X Trio has decent cooling capabilities, with the GPU fans running at around 1450 RPM and settling in at 75 degrees Celsius. This is a good starting point, but further testing will be needed to confirm its effectiveness. The power consumption of the RTX 3090 is 44 watts more than that of the RTX 3080 when tested in control mode at 4k, which could potentially push 600-watt power supplies over the edge.

Overclocking and Underclocking - A Tale of Two GPUs

It's hard not to get excited about overclocking and underclocking both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. While Nvidia hasn't officially announced any plans for overclocking or underclocking, enthusiasts are eager to explore these possibilities. In-depth content on this topic is in the works, but it requires its own entire video.

The Misleading Marketing of the RTX 3090

One can't help but feel a bit misled by Nvidia's marketing efforts surrounding the RTX 3090. Initially, the company didn't position the RTX 3090 as a gaming GPU, and instead focused on its capabilities for production workloads and 8K gaming. However, more recently, Nvidia has been pushing this narrative that the RTX 3090 is capable of 8K gaming. This creates a problem - if it can do 8K gaming, why wouldn't it be able to crush 4k gaming and 1440p resolution gaming? The truth is that the RTX 3090 is only around 12-14% faster than the RTX 3080 in these resolutions.

Who Should Buy the RTX 3090?

So, who should buy the RTX 3090? If your computer is a money-maker and you frequently encounter video memory limitations in your workflow, then this GPU is for you. It's clear that scientists, researchers, and 3D artists will rejoice at having access to a massive 24 GB of GDDR6X memory.

However, for those who use software like Blender or Octane Render, which have excellent multi-GPU support, the best option might be to consider two RTX 3080s instead. This would provide a more cost-effective way to spend around $1500 on GPU rendering performance, and it's worth noting that some workloads don't scale as well with multi-GPU support.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while the RTX 3090 has its advantages over the RTX 3080, particularly in terms of raw power and memory bandwidth, it's not without its drawbacks. The marketing efforts surrounding this GPU have created a bit of confusion, but at the end of the day, there's still plenty to be excited about.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and support. Don't forget to check out the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which Nvidia kindly sent our way. We'll be bringing you tons of content on both cards in the coming weeks and months.

Links:

* [RTX 3080](link)

* [RTX 3090](link)

Note: The links are fictional and will not work as they are not real.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're testing nvidia's rtx 3090 this is their flagship gpu for the current 30 series uh generation of gpus and a gpu that they're saying is of titan level of performance but unlike titan cards nvidia have allowed their aftermarket sort of board partners to package them with their aftermarket cooler designs and that is something that might confuse consumers of what this card is actually meant to do at 1500 us dollars this is the most expensive gpu that i've had on the test bench and it's the fastest as well as you could probably expect but if you're after a high-end gaming gpu or a high-end workstation gpu how much better is this over the rtx 3080 is it twice as good or at least 50 percent as good let's take a look so let's dive in and take a look at what's different versus the rtx 3080 that we've taken a look at over the last week and which offered some extremely good performance for the money the 3090 offers a little over 20 more cuda cores rt cores and tensor cores than the 3080 at a roughly similar boost clock on paper the big difference here though is the memory configuration the 30 90 packs a mammoth 24 gigabytes of gddr6 x memory with a max bandwidth edging close to one terabyte per second the total board power comes in at 350 watts and all of that is on offer for 1500 us dollars now that sounds like a lot of money for a gpu and don't get me wrong it absolutely is but let's put this into perspective the titan rtx from last generation came in at 2500 us and offers less performance on paper at least and when we compare it to the rtx 2080 ti the real difference between them is only around 300 us dollars and for that difference the 3090 offers a ton more hardware under the hood but it really is nvidia verse themselves here because the question that we all want to know as consumers is how much better the rtx 3090 is over the 3080 is it really worth over double the price so the specific card that i have here for testing is the rtx 3090 gaming x trio from msi this is their flagship design as many of you know and unlike the 3080 this one has a completely metal backplate with heat pipes underneath and msi have really cleaned up their design for this series the gaming x trio looks exceptional and you can expect a very quiet fan curve out of the box this card has a slightly higher power limit and boost clock out of the box compared to the founders edition so keep that in mind when we look at the performance and that is something that we will be comparing because i do actually have the founders edition card right here and yes it is absolutely ginormous and it is the biggest card that nvidia have ever produced for a founder's edition card i will have a dedicated video on this one going up tomorrow so make sure you are subscribed i also do have the tough model from asus following a few days after that and from what we saw from their 3080 model i'd expect the performance here to be very good for now though let's just jump right into the performance benchmarks and let's start off with the production workloads first as opposed to starting with gaming because i do think that makes sense for this gpu let's kick things off with blender and here we're looking at a 4k render at 500 samples per tile and the 3090 beats the 3080 by 14.6 percent and a little over a minute saved for this particular scene this was using cuda but let's see if things improve when we switch over to optics and actually they don't here the 3090 was just 13 faster than the 3080 and that's very surprising given it costs over twice as much so if you have hundred dollars to put towards gpu rendering performance in your system you'd actually be better off with two rtx 3080s theoretically you'd be doubling your rendering performance and beating the 3090 by almost 38 this is something that i do actually plan to test in a future video v-ray gives us slightly more promising results though over 23 percent more performance than the rtx 3080 but still not what you'd expect for paying a little over double now for video editors don't expect much faster performance when it comes to export times or video stabilization the only time that you really need to upgrade to the 30 90 is for the absolutely huge vram capacity of 24 gigabytes and the use cases that need that amount of vram are hard to test for and usually highly specific for example my own video editing demands do sometimes exceed the 11 gigabytes of vram on my rtx 2080 ti that's usually when working with very large projects on a high resolution timeline while also stabilizing a lot of footage so that massive video memory capacity would actually be useful to me and i expect a lot of other davinci resolve users working with 6k and 8k footage would say the same thing we'll come back to this video memory discussion but for now let's move on to gaming let's kick things off with a direct comparison against the rtx 3080 in red dead redemption 2 at 1440p and i really mean it when i say that nvidia is up against themselves here the rtx 3080 not only looks exceptional against gpus like the rtx 2080 and 2080 ti but we're looking at a performance margin of only 12 percent here between it and the 3090. sure it's just 1440p and we might see a slightly larger bump at higher resolutions with the faster memory configuration on the 3090 but 1440p is wildly more popular than 4k and at 4k the 3090 is now almost 13 faster than the 3080 now able to exceed over 200 fps in rainbow six siege completely maxed out so exceptional performance in a vacuum but also exceptionally poor value when compared to the 3080 as a gaming gpu and so far the rtx 3090 is looking like a titan tier card in the purest sense titan cards have commonly been marketed for production workloads and their very large memory capacities and have never really offered outstanding gaming performance margins over the top tier gaming cards underneath them in fact in star wars jedi fall in order there's only an eight percent performance margin between it and the 3080 and that's typically a margin that you could close with a beefy overclock what i find interesting here is when you remove the 3080 from these graphs the 3090 looks exceptional when compared to the 1200 2080 ti there you're getting almost a 50 performance increase versus a 25 increase in price and that's actually extremely good value when you're looking at this tier of gpu but with the 30 80 thrown into the mix the 3090 is a hard sell in shadow of the tomb raider again completely maxed out at 4k we see another 12 performance margin in favor of the rtx 3090 and look i'm not expecting double the performance for basically double the price no one expects that when you're talking about top tier gpus but i think most of us expected at least 30 over the 30 80 after all that's roughly what you get with a 2080 ti over at 2080. so the 3090 is no doubt the fastest gaming gpu that we've seen but with consistent performance margins of as little as 13 it's barely a perceivable difference over the rtx 3080. again the 3080 is the real party crasher here the 3090 is an insanely fast gpu on its own but it's almost as if nvidia made the 3080 too fast there was one interesting game benchmark between these two gpus though and that's battlefield 5. here we're looking at 4k ultra settings and again the 3090 leads by 13 but the 3090 is the only gpu in this title that i've tested that has shown consistent stable frame rate performance the real-time fps graphs at the top show this clearly with the 3090 having no small frequent dips in frame rate which by the way aren't really perceivable on the 3080 only with lower end cards f1 2020 showed the largest performance lead for the rtx 3090 a 15.7 percent increase over the 30 80. that gets stretched to 16.1 when we factor in dlss for both gpus with both delivering well over 144 fps at 4k now it's hard to complain about gaming performance here when nvidia have clearly stated that the 3080 is the gaming flagship gpu and not the 3090. and looking at the results it's pretty clear why they said that lastly we have control with the smallest difference between these two gpus that i've tested at around 10 in both pure rasterization performance and when factoring in ray tracing and dlss here we're looking at the game at 4k completely maxed out and that's enough to reduce both gpus to under 60 fps both the 3080 and 3090 get a small boost when factoring in ray tracing and dlss and at this point the 3090 is just able to edge over an average of 60 fps clock speeds for the msi gaming x trio variant of the rtx 3090 have it settling in at around 1900 megahertz which is only 30 megahertz less than what we saw with the 3080 of the same card and cooler design nvidia do list a slightly lower boost clock for the 30 90 compared to the 3080 so this is what you would expect the gaming x trio has decent thermal performance from what we can see so far although i haven't compared it to anything just yet so do stay tuned for the follow up reviews with the founders edition and asus tough for comparison as we saw with the 3080 gaming x trio this card has a quiet fan curve which runs a little bit on the warmer end settling in at 75 degrees c with the gpu fans at around 1450 rpm power consumption is 44 watts over the 30 80 when tested in control at 4k that's not a significant amount but it's likely going to be enough to push 600 watt power supplies over the edge in more cpu intensive games i will note that i'm also planning some in-depth content on overclocking and under vaulting both the 3080 and 3090 and what effect that has on power thermals and overall performance but that definitely requires its own entire video so on one hand it's hard to complain about the gaming performance compared to the 3080 when nvidia didn't initially position the 3090 as a gpu for gamers at least with the initial announcement but then at the same time recently really pushing this as a gpu that's capable of 8k gaming i feel it's a bit misleading now i have absolutely no problem saying that yes the rtx 3090 could probably game at 8k resolution if you do have an 8k tv or an 8k monitor which is probably very few of you i'm guessing but the problem is that if this is now an 8k gaming gpu and kind of people see the marketing headlines and sponsored content around 8k gaming people think that okay if this thing can do 8k gaming it can probably absolutely crush 4k gaming and 1440p resolution gaming in reality it's only 12 to 14 faster than the 3080 in those resolutions so i would have liked to see a clear cut in the marketing as to what this gpu actually is is it a gaming gpu or a production workload gpu with a ton of vram in the end who should buy the rtx 3090 well if your computer makes you money and you frequently encounter video memory limitations in your current workflow the 3090 is the single fastest gpu to chew through whatever it is you do i have no doubt that there are scientists researchers and 3d artists out there who are rejoicing at a lower cost titan equivalent gpu with a huge 24 gigabytes of gddr6x memory to play with but for the same price maybe also consider two rtx 3080s especially if you use something like blender or octane render which both do have excellent multi gpu support that would be the most effective way to spend around fifteen hundred dollars towards gpu rendering performance and i do understand that some workloads don't scale as well or at all with multi gpu support so there is a case for the 3090 if you are willing to pay as much as it is so i'll leave some links down below in the description if you're interested in the 3080 or the 3090 although don't expect stock to be there just right now definitely check back in a couple weeks or so as always a huge thanks for watching plenty of content out around the corner as you can see we do also have the rtx 3080 founders edition which nvidia kindly sent over and there will be tons of content coming up on these two cards here so as always a huge thanks for watching and i will see you all in the next onetoday we're testing nvidia's rtx 3090 this is their flagship gpu for the current 30 series uh generation of gpus and a gpu that they're saying is of titan level of performance but unlike titan cards nvidia have allowed their aftermarket sort of board partners to package them with their aftermarket cooler designs and that is something that might confuse consumers of what this card is actually meant to do at 1500 us dollars this is the most expensive gpu that i've had on the test bench and it's the fastest as well as you could probably expect but if you're after a high-end gaming gpu or a high-end workstation gpu how much better is this over the rtx 3080 is it twice as good or at least 50 percent as good let's take a look so let's dive in and take a look at what's different versus the rtx 3080 that we've taken a look at over the last week and which offered some extremely good performance for the money the 3090 offers a little over 20 more cuda cores rt cores and tensor cores than the 3080 at a roughly similar boost clock on paper the big difference here though is the memory configuration the 30 90 packs a mammoth 24 gigabytes of gddr6 x memory with a max bandwidth edging close to one terabyte per second the total board power comes in at 350 watts and all of that is on offer for 1500 us dollars now that sounds like a lot of money for a gpu and don't get me wrong it absolutely is but let's put this into perspective the titan rtx from last generation came in at 2500 us and offers less performance on paper at least and when we compare it to the rtx 2080 ti the real difference between them is only around 300 us dollars and for that difference the 3090 offers a ton more hardware under the hood but it really is nvidia verse themselves here because the question that we all want to know as consumers is how much better the rtx 3090 is over the 3080 is it really worth over double the price so the specific card that i have here for testing is the rtx 3090 gaming x trio from msi this is their flagship design as many of you know and unlike the 3080 this one has a completely metal backplate with heat pipes underneath and msi have really cleaned up their design for this series the gaming x trio looks exceptional and you can expect a very quiet fan curve out of the box this card has a slightly higher power limit and boost clock out of the box compared to the founders edition so keep that in mind when we look at the performance and that is something that we will be comparing because i do actually have the founders edition card right here and yes it is absolutely ginormous and it is the biggest card that nvidia have ever produced for a founder's edition card i will have a dedicated video on this one going up tomorrow so make sure you are subscribed i also do have the tough model from asus following a few days after that and from what we saw from their 3080 model i'd expect the performance here to be very good for now though let's just jump right into the performance benchmarks and let's start off with the production workloads first as opposed to starting with gaming because i do think that makes sense for this gpu let's kick things off with blender and here we're looking at a 4k render at 500 samples per tile and the 3090 beats the 3080 by 14.6 percent and a little over a minute saved for this particular scene this was using cuda but let's see if things improve when we switch over to optics and actually they don't here the 3090 was just 13 faster than the 3080 and that's very surprising given it costs over twice as much so if you have hundred dollars to put towards gpu rendering performance in your system you'd actually be better off with two rtx 3080s theoretically you'd be doubling your rendering performance and beating the 3090 by almost 38 this is something that i do actually plan to test in a future video v-ray gives us slightly more promising results though over 23 percent more performance than the rtx 3080 but still not what you'd expect for paying a little over double now for video editors don't expect much faster performance when it comes to export times or video stabilization the only time that you really need to upgrade to the 30 90 is for the absolutely huge vram capacity of 24 gigabytes and the use cases that need that amount of vram are hard to test for and usually highly specific for example my own video editing demands do sometimes exceed the 11 gigabytes of vram on my rtx 2080 ti that's usually when working with very large projects on a high resolution timeline while also stabilizing a lot of footage so that massive video memory capacity would actually be useful to me and i expect a lot of other davinci resolve users working with 6k and 8k footage would say the same thing we'll come back to this video memory discussion but for now let's move on to gaming let's kick things off with a direct comparison against the rtx 3080 in red dead redemption 2 at 1440p and i really mean it when i say that nvidia is up against themselves here the rtx 3080 not only looks exceptional against gpus like the rtx 2080 and 2080 ti but we're looking at a performance margin of only 12 percent here between it and the 3090. sure it's just 1440p and we might see a slightly larger bump at higher resolutions with the faster memory configuration on the 3090 but 1440p is wildly more popular than 4k and at 4k the 3090 is now almost 13 faster than the 3080 now able to exceed over 200 fps in rainbow six siege completely maxed out so exceptional performance in a vacuum but also exceptionally poor value when compared to the 3080 as a gaming gpu and so far the rtx 3090 is looking like a titan tier card in the purest sense titan cards have commonly been marketed for production workloads and their very large memory capacities and have never really offered outstanding gaming performance margins over the top tier gaming cards underneath them in fact in star wars jedi fall in order there's only an eight percent performance margin between it and the 3080 and that's typically a margin that you could close with a beefy overclock what i find interesting here is when you remove the 3080 from these graphs the 3090 looks exceptional when compared to the 1200 2080 ti there you're getting almost a 50 performance increase versus a 25 increase in price and that's actually extremely good value when you're looking at this tier of gpu but with the 30 80 thrown into the mix the 3090 is a hard sell in shadow of the tomb raider again completely maxed out at 4k we see another 12 performance margin in favor of the rtx 3090 and look i'm not expecting double the performance for basically double the price no one expects that when you're talking about top tier gpus but i think most of us expected at least 30 over the 30 80 after all that's roughly what you get with a 2080 ti over at 2080. so the 3090 is no doubt the fastest gaming gpu that we've seen but with consistent performance margins of as little as 13 it's barely a perceivable difference over the rtx 3080. again the 3080 is the real party crasher here the 3090 is an insanely fast gpu on its own but it's almost as if nvidia made the 3080 too fast there was one interesting game benchmark between these two gpus though and that's battlefield 5. here we're looking at 4k ultra settings and again the 3090 leads by 13 but the 3090 is the only gpu in this title that i've tested that has shown consistent stable frame rate performance the real-time fps graphs at the top show this clearly with the 3090 having no small frequent dips in frame rate which by the way aren't really perceivable on the 3080 only with lower end cards f1 2020 showed the largest performance lead for the rtx 3090 a 15.7 percent increase over the 30 80. that gets stretched to 16.1 when we factor in dlss for both gpus with both delivering well over 144 fps at 4k now it's hard to complain about gaming performance here when nvidia have clearly stated that the 3080 is the gaming flagship gpu and not the 3090. and looking at the results it's pretty clear why they said that lastly we have control with the smallest difference between these two gpus that i've tested at around 10 in both pure rasterization performance and when factoring in ray tracing and dlss here we're looking at the game at 4k completely maxed out and that's enough to reduce both gpus to under 60 fps both the 3080 and 3090 get a small boost when factoring in ray tracing and dlss and at this point the 3090 is just able to edge over an average of 60 fps clock speeds for the msi gaming x trio variant of the rtx 3090 have it settling in at around 1900 megahertz which is only 30 megahertz less than what we saw with the 3080 of the same card and cooler design nvidia do list a slightly lower boost clock for the 30 90 compared to the 3080 so this is what you would expect the gaming x trio has decent thermal performance from what we can see so far although i haven't compared it to anything just yet so do stay tuned for the follow up reviews with the founders edition and asus tough for comparison as we saw with the 3080 gaming x trio this card has a quiet fan curve which runs a little bit on the warmer end settling in at 75 degrees c with the gpu fans at around 1450 rpm power consumption is 44 watts over the 30 80 when tested in control at 4k that's not a significant amount but it's likely going to be enough to push 600 watt power supplies over the edge in more cpu intensive games i will note that i'm also planning some in-depth content on overclocking and under vaulting both the 3080 and 3090 and what effect that has on power thermals and overall performance but that definitely requires its own entire video so on one hand it's hard to complain about the gaming performance compared to the 3080 when nvidia didn't initially position the 3090 as a gpu for gamers at least with the initial announcement but then at the same time recently really pushing this as a gpu that's capable of 8k gaming i feel it's a bit misleading now i have absolutely no problem saying that yes the rtx 3090 could probably game at 8k resolution if you do have an 8k tv or an 8k monitor which is probably very few of you i'm guessing but the problem is that if this is now an 8k gaming gpu and kind of people see the marketing headlines and sponsored content around 8k gaming people think that okay if this thing can do 8k gaming it can probably absolutely crush 4k gaming and 1440p resolution gaming in reality it's only 12 to 14 faster than the 3080 in those resolutions so i would have liked to see a clear cut in the marketing as to what this gpu actually is is it a gaming gpu or a production workload gpu with a ton of vram in the end who should buy the rtx 3090 well if your computer makes you money and you frequently encounter video memory limitations in your current workflow the 3090 is the single fastest gpu to chew through whatever it is you do i have no doubt that there are scientists researchers and 3d artists out there who are rejoicing at a lower cost titan equivalent gpu with a huge 24 gigabytes of gddr6x memory to play with but for the same price maybe also consider two rtx 3080s especially if you use something like blender or octane render which both do have excellent multi gpu support that would be the most effective way to spend around fifteen hundred dollars towards gpu rendering performance and i do understand that some workloads don't scale as well or at all with multi gpu support so there is a case for the 3090 if you are willing to pay as much as it is so i'll leave some links down below in the description if you're interested in the 3080 or the 3090 although don't expect stock to be there just right now definitely check back in a couple weeks or so as always a huge thanks for watching plenty of content out around the corner as you can see we do also have the rtx 3080 founders edition which nvidia kindly sent over and there will be tons of content coming up on these two cards here so as always a huge thanks for watching and i will see you all in the next one\n"