PC World - USA (2021-03)

46 PCWorld MARCH 2021

REVIEWS NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3080 MOBILE

Moving to something far less graphically

intense, we fire up Counter Strike: Global

Operations set to 1920x1080 and using the

“Very High” Preset. We’re not even sure “Very

High” meant that when the game came out in

2012, but from 2021, it’s definitely not high at

all. This is one game that actually exceeds the

300Hz refresh of the panels, and it’s probably

a game where you need it if you want to

compete to win or just don’t like getting

AWP-shot by a 12-year-old every time you

rush the bomb site. Yup, that’s about a

3.5-percent advantage for the RTX 3080

laptop over the RTX 2080 Super. So—the

terrorists win.

Obviously one problem with the previous

games we’ve run is they’re all very much

CPU-bound. It is, in fact, a problem for the

RTX 3080 on laptops. Just as laptop GPUs are

a compromise to make them work in a laptop,

so too are CPUs. To stretch the laptops a little

more, we fired up Red Dead Redemption 2

with the performance slider set to prefer

quality. That saw the RTX 3080 open up a little

more breathing room, edging out the RTX

2080 Super by about 18 percent.

RAY-TRACING

PERFORMANCE

We moved on to hardware ray-tracing games,

specifically Metro Exodus, which uses

hardware ray-traced global illumination. The

result gave the RTX 3080 laptop about a 20

percent lead over the RTX 2080 laptops.

Next up on our ray-tracing performance

adventure is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with

textures set to Ultra and ray-traced shadows

set to Ultra as well. This saw the RTX 3080

open up about a 27 percent performance

advantage over the 2080 Super.

We decided to take it up one more notch

by running the Bright Memory: Infinite Ray

Counter Strike: Global

Operations 19x10

Frames per second

Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H

Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

324.8

336.31

Red Redemption 2

19x10 Prefer Quality

Frames per second

Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H

Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

59.7

70.3

Gear Tactics

Ultra 19x10

Frames per second

Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H

Gigabyte Aero 178-core Core-10870H

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

97.8

111.6