Following up on our recent extensive benchmarking of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, today's comparison will be between the RTX 40 series GPU and the two and a half-year-old GeForce RTX 3080 10GB. Naturally, we'll be testing this in 50 games, some of which will be tested in different configurations and in some cases with ray tracing and upscaling turned on.
Considering that the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 3080 are "meant to be" on two separate GPU classes, you might be wondering why this comparison is important. But that's just a moniker, and businesses like Nvidia and AMD frequently upsell gamers using their existing product families, and that's exactly what's happening here.
Prior to the cryptocurrency boom, the GeForce RTX 3080 launched at a price of $700, making it very impossible to find one at that price. Eventually, Nvidia made the decision to exploit the market scenario by reissuing the GA102 and GA104 CPUs with modest spec upgrades, charging $1,200 for the RTX 3080 Ti and a more affordable $600 for the RTX 3070 Ti.
Yet, many gamers did buy a 10GB GeForce RTX 3080, and many are definitely considering upgrading to an RTX 40 series product. However, the pricing issue is that it has significantly increased. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti has an MSRP of $800, with the majority of variants selling for $850 or more.
Worse still, if you want the more desirable RTX 4080, those cost $1,200 — they are supposed to cost that, but in reality they are closer to $1,300 — ouch.
Another possible situation is that you didn't buy any GPUs during the crypto boom — smart! — and now you are ready to buy a new graphics card. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is pretty expensive at $800+ and while the RTX 3080 is no longer selling new, it may be attractive to buy second hand if you can find it for around $500-$550. Depending on what you own right now, this may still be considerably faster and a nice upgrade.
So, compared to the RTX 3080 10GB, does the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti have much to offer? Comparing some specs, the RTX 4070 Ti is 14% more expensive than the RTX 3080 was at launch, the die itself is 53% smaller though it manages to pack 27% more transistors thanks to the upgrade to the TSMC N4 process, a significant step up from Samsung's 8LPP.
The GeForce 4070 Ti packs 8 times more L2 cache going from a mere 6 MB to 48 MB. The core configuration sees less CUDA cores, but IPC has been improved. The RTX 4070 Ti includes an extra 2GB of VRAM, taking the total to 12GB, but memory bandwidth has been significantly reduced due to a more limited 192-bit wide bus. That's a massive downgrade from the 320-bit wide bus on the RTX 3080, which when paired with 19 Gbps memory resulted in a bandwidth of 760 GB/s.
The RTX 4070 Ti uses faster 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory, but the narrower bus sees bandwidth cut to just 504 GB/s, a big 34% reduction. In memory sensitive scenarios, the RTX 4070 Ti will likely suffer, and that's something we're going to be looking at in our benchmarks. Ultimately, we want to see how the 3080 and 4070 Ti compare across a wide range of games, so let's go do that.
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