NOVEMBER 2020 PCWorld 71The GeForce RTX 3080 FE blows away
the RTX 2080 at 1440p too. The lead
actually diminishes a bit, because this card
being so fast that even an Intel CPU
overclocked to 5GHz struggles to feed
frames to it fast enough. It’s an excellent
option for a 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor
that splits the difference between 1440p and
4K, though.
Say goodbye to concerns about lowered
resolution in ray-traced games, which
plagued the original generation of RTX
GPUs. In the handful of ray-traced games we
tested with Nvidia’s Deep Learning
Supersampling (DLSS) technology active,
playing at 1440p and even 4K at over 60 fps
is possible with the cutting-edge lighting
technologies enabled.
Bottom line? The RTX 3080 screams.
- ...BUT MOST PEOPLE
DON’T NEED IT
All that said, the vast majority of gamers use a
1080p monitor, and the GeForce RTX 3080
would be an overkill purchase to pair with an
HD display. If you keep visual settings cranked
to Ultra at 1080p with this beast, the CPU
becomes the bottleneck more often than not.
Yes, the GeForce RTX 3080 still maintains a
sizeable advantage over the RTX 2080 at
Grand Theft Auto V is CPU/engine bottlenecked at
both 1080p and 1440p, so you see similar results
with many top-end graphics cards. The RTX 3080
is only noticeably faster at 4K resolution.LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCENvidia GeForce GTX 1080 FE
93.5107.752.1
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2
104.4108.8
70.9
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 FE
101.8
64.9
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super
FE 102.72107.5
68.3
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE 108.3
106
80.9
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 FE
110.7111.6
95.7105.8GTA V
Frames per second
1080p 1440p 4KShadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K resolution with
ray tracing and DLSS enabled. It easily clears 60fps.
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCENvidia GeForce GTX 2080 FE
49
Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Super
FE
Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Ti FENvidia GeForce GTX 3080 FE39Shadow of the Tomb
Raider Frames per second524664588371RTX off RTX on