Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti vs RTX 4080 Super: Which is the best gaming GPU?
The Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 4080 Super are two of the most powerful GPUs in the world. The former is the flagship graphics card of the 3000 series, while the latter is the second most powerful entry in the 4000 series. Since they are a generation apart, there should be an obvious difference in performance, features, and even pricing.
Can the newer generation RTX 4080 Super beat the previous flagship GPU? That's exactly what we determine in this article.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and solely reflect the writer's opinions.
Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti vs RTX 4080 Super
The Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti is designed on the Ampere architecture that introduced a higher CUDA core count, better ray-tracing capability, and more VRAM compared to its predecessor.
On the other hand, the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super is based on the Ada Lovelace architecture that led the way to significantly better performance per watt and higher clock speeds.
Specs comparison
Here are the specs of the two GPUs:
The major differences between the two GPUs lie in the architectural changes, clock speeds, memory capacity, and memory bandwidth. The RTX 4080 Super has only 16GB VRAM, which is a lot lower than the 24GB memory of the RTX 3090 Ti. However, the impact won't be very noticeable at 1080p and 1440p gaming. That said, there could be a noticeable difference in 4K gaming, especially with ray tracing enabled.
There's also a DLSS feature imparity between the two GPUs. Check out the DLSS features supported by the two graphics cards below:
The DLSS features allow the graphics cards to provide more FPS, which will be beneficial in many games, especially at 4K resolution.
Performance comparison
Let's now look at the performance of the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 4080 Super across many games in two sets of benchmarks.
Note: All the FPS numbers were sourced from the Jansn Benchmarks channel on YouTube. The two video cards were tested at 4K with High/Ultra settings.
Here's how the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 4080 Super perform in rasterization:
On average, the RTX 4080 Super scores about 15% higher than the RTX 3090 Ti in rasterization across every game except Hogwarts Legacy. For some reason, both cards score the same FPS in that game.
With that said, here's how the two cards perform in ray tracing:
The two video cards were tested at 4K with Max/Ultra ray tracing settings.
On average, the RTX 4080 Super scores about 18% higher than the RTX 3090 Ti in games with ray tracing enabled. In Cyberpunk 2077, both cards had FPS below 30, which is certainly not ideal, but tracing is very taxing.
You can gain a lot of performance back if you turn on DLSS upscaling and even more so by turning on DLSS 3 Frame Generation (FG). However, only RTX 4080 Super supports FG, so it has another advantage over the older card apart from the performance.
Pricing comparison
The pricing is another area where the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super takes another win. It costs $964, which is 50% cheaper than the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti ($1448). The former graphics card costs less, yet it provides more performance in every game.
Final verdict of Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti vs RTX 4080 Super
The Nvidia RTX 4080 Super is clearly the better GPU out of the two. It is 15 - 18% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti while costing 50% less. It also supports newer features like Frame Generation that could double the frame rates in supported games.
Check out our other GPU comparisons:
- AMD RX 6600 vs Intel Arc A580
- AMD RX 7900 XT vs Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super
- Radeon RX 7800 XT vs Radeon RX 7900 GRE
- Intel Arc A750 vs RTX 406