The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080’s slow-paced announcement and eventual launch has been… a captivating street. From its mis-named little brother getting “unlaunched” to the RTX 4080 Founders Edition being the identical measurement as the massive RTX 4090 for some cause, to the melting 12VHPWR power connectors—that are nonetheless on this card, sure. Nvidia has fairly the PR battle with the $1,200 GeForce RTX 4080, however if you happen to ignore all of the noise, does this new card ship the products for content material creators?

Thankfully, performance-wise it does principally dwell as much as the hype; I simply discover myself wishing we had larger VRAM capacities on such costly graphics playing cards.

This evaluation is targeted on work, as a substitute of play, just like my recent RTX 4090 content creation analysis. Photo enhancing, video enhancing, encoding, AI artwork technology, 3D and VFX workflows—stuff I exploit daily for my EposVox and analog_dreams YouTube channels. Look for PCWorld’s gaming-focused RTX 4080 evaluation to land tomorrow, or try our high-level holistic have a look at 5 must-know RTX 4080 facts from our intensive gaming and creator testing proper now.

Let’s dig in.

Our check setup

Most of my benchmarking was carried out on this check bench:

• Intel Core i9-12900k CPU
• 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5200MT/s RAM
• ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E Gaming Wifi Motherboard
• EVGA G3 850W PSU
• Source information saved on a PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSD

This time, my goals had been to see how effectively the brand new RTX 4080 stood its floor towards the last-generation GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. At $1,200, the RTX 4080 wants to actually out-shine the RTX 3090 (which may now be had for $1,000 to $1,200 on common)—however then if it does, the query turns into whether or not the RTX 4090 is warranted in any respect.

For some extra hardcore testing later, as I’ll point out, testing was accomplished on this check bench:

• AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX CPU
• 256GB Kingston ECC DDR4 RAM
• ASUS WRX80 SAGE Motherboard
• BeQuiet 1400W PSU
• Source information saved on a PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSD
• Each check featured every GPU in the identical config as to not combine outcomes.

Photo enhancing

I’m going to maintain testing this simply because there’s fixed “little surprises” in efficiency in picture apps—even when, realistically, you’re not going to get any main good points upgrading from one high-end graphics card to a different.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

The GeForce RTX 4080 tops the charts for many scores in Adobe Photoshop (aside from the AMD Radeon RX 6600’s weirdly excessive efficiency… maybe we have to get some extra AMD playing cards in the home for an AMD picture enhancing deep dive). Photoshop was examined utilizing the PugetBench check suite, offered by the superior workstation builders over at Puget Systems.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

In Lightroom Classic (additionally utilizing PugetBench), the RTX 4080 beats out even the 4090’s general rating, however for many duties, you’ll see marginal good points over the RTX 3080 and 3090, and proper up towards the 4090’s efficiency.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Benchmarking Affinity Photo (I do know V2 just came out… let’s hold it constant for now) the RTX 4080 slots completely between the RTX 3090 and 4090, because it ought to.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Video enhancing

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Using PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro sees the brand new RTX 4080 land a good bit larger than the RTX 3090, just below the RTX 4090. Interestingly, export and playback scores had been barely larger than the RTX 4090, in the meantime the Effects and GPU scores had been decrease. If you’re doing GPU-heavy workloads at 4K and better, you’ll completely desire a 4090, however most video editors will likely be simply wonderful with a 4080.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

This carries over into BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve. Resolve simply obtained a brand new replace to model 18.1—a huge replace bringing AI audio cleanup, new fusion options and lastly fixing fractional scaling points on Windows, together with efficiency boosts.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Running PugetBench, we see the GeForce RTX 4080 put up fairly substantial good points—good points you’ll really feel—over final gen’s RTX 3080 and even the 3090. This is significantly spectacular stuff. If you had been contemplating a 3090 or RTX Titan for video enhancing earlier than across the $1,000 worth vary, I’d truthfully think about throwing in an additional couple hundred {dollars} to get this increase plus AV1 encoding! If you had been eying a 3080 or 3070 as a substitute, that’s a a lot more durable promote given the upper price.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Exporting a pattern 4K undertaking, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 run laps across the older playing cards in H265 and AV1 in comparison with Arc. They’re nonetheless quicker than older playing cards in H.264 too, however by a lot smaller margins.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Throwing the cardboard in my Threadripper Pro construct to textual content my intense 8K undertaking stuffed with 8K RAW footage, Resolve SuperScaled 4K footage, plugins and results… sadly the 4080 couldn’t export this, identical to the earlier 80-tier playing cards I examined. 16GB of VRAM nonetheless isn’t sufficient, I suppose—plugins error out, colour graded footage takes longer than the 4090, and so forth. 8K is hard, however for $1,200 I’d hope at this level to begin to see larger VRAM capacities when Intel is handing out $350 Arc graphics cards with 16GB. Strange occasions.

One of the large enhancements with Resolve 18.1 is pace will increase to AI-based Face Tracking and object masking. The beta construct of Resolve I had entry to for my RTX 4090 evaluation was alleged to have efficiency boosts for this, too—however from what I can inform the Face Tracking updates weren’t working proper as a result of it’s considerably fasterin 18.1 in comparison with even that preview construct.

The time taken to face observe on 8K RAW footage in a 4K timeline dropped by 45 % throughout all examined GPUs. Even the older Ampere and Turing playing cards moved quicker for this usually very sluggish job—however Lovelace simply runs away with it.

Adam Taylor/IDG

The RTX 4080 tracks simply barely slower than the 4090, however each go away the Ampere playing cards within the mud. Weirdly, the RTX Titan is in a detailed third behind the brand new playing cards—maybe some added AI magic within the Titan {hardware}, or higher floating level efficiency benefits? I’m undecided.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Object masking didn’t enhance as a lot with older generations, however the GeForce RTX 4080 matches the 4090 right here and places up 17 % quicker speeds than older playing cards. Very rad. Huge shouts out to the Resolve crew for nailing such a giant replace, and if you happen to do video enhancing daily like I do, this new technology goes to earn your time again quick. I’m so uninterested in ready on issues.

AI wizardry

Upscaling video to 4K utilizing Topaz Labs’ Video Enhance AI (720p upscaled to 4K utilizing Artemis Low Quality), the GeForce RTX 4080 is a tad slower than the 4090, however nonetheless virtually a minute quicker than the RTX 3090. It’s nonetheless a bit of too sluggish for me to be snug utilizing it on the common for quick-turnaround tasks, however we’re getting there!

Adam Taylor/IDG

Similar outcomes are present in Gigapixel. Upscaling 8 photos exhibits the RTX 4080 operating 10 seconds slower than the 4090, however nonetheless a good bit quicker than anything.

Adam Taylor/IDG

PhotoAI wanted to be fully re-tested. Remember how horrible Nvidia playing cards carried out in my RTX 4090 review? Apparently there was a giant bug inflicting that, and Topaz has now mounted it. The RTX 4080 performs the identical because the 4090 right here, however each playing cards take lower than a third of the time the older playing cards take. This is the form of AI efficiency enhancements I used to be anticipating to see with Lovelace!

Adam Taylor/IDG

Generating AI artwork with Stable Diffusion exhibits the RTX 4080 being a bit of slower than the RTX 3090 usually, however nonetheless beating out the RTX Titan and 3080. I’m advised by folks in these communities that there’s in all probability some optimization that may be accomplished within the apps for Stable to optimize particularly for Lovelace, so hopefully we see that quickly. (Who do I ship a card to?)

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

Using CirculateFrames to AI interpolate a 60FPS video into 120FPS for slowmo, the RTX 4080 is just a bit quicker than the RTX 3090. Nice to see, however Lovelace has {hardware} built-in to do body interpolation in real-time with DLSS3 Frame Generation—there merely isn’t any software program assist for this exterior of video games. (For video, this can be a characteristic known as FRUC.) I’d love to see integrations with DaVinci Resolve for making use of this to footage on the timeline, in addition to in OBS Studio for smoothing out stuttery captures. A man can dream, I suppose.

Adam Taylor/IDG

3D & VFX

If you’re a 3D artist or VFX artist utilizing 3D rendering, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 isn’t any slouch, both. Now, the larger, badder RTX 4090 put up insane numbers, doubling the 3090’s efficiency in methods you can’t totally anticipate with this step-down GPU—nevertheless it’s shut!

Adam Taylor/IDG

In Blender, benchmarking the Monster scene with the RTX 4080 nets about 60 % quicker pace over the RTX 3090 and 85 % quicker than the 3080. The Junkshop scene benched about 29 % quicker than the 3090 and 50 % quicker than the 3080, whereas the basic Classroom scene exhibits 55 % quicker efficiency than the 3090 and 82 % quicker than the 3080. So whereas the GeForce RTX 4080 was by no means going to be as absurdly quick because the 4090, these are some superb good points.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Adam Taylor/IDG

The development continues into Octane, the place the RTX 4080 performs 42 % quicker than the 4090 and 67 % quicker than the 3080. And only for kicks, if you happen to’re nonetheless on the RTX Titan… almost 3X the efficiency. I’m so sorry that card as soon as price $2500.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Testing the V-Ray engine with the VRAY 5 benchmark is an oddity. The VRAY RTX check exhibits the 4080 nonetheless trailing behind the RTX 4090 a good bit, however leaping considerably over the older technology GPUs, however in CUDA? For some cause I’m constantly scoring under these older playing cards in efficiency. I can’t clarify this, a bug, given all the opposite efficiency outcomes we’re seeing right here.

Adam Taylor/IDG

Streaming

All GeForce RTX 40-series playing cards have twin video encoder chips to permit for quicker and better high quality 4K and 8K recording, in addition to 8K 60FPS seize (Ampere caps out at 8K 30FPS). You can learn extra about this within the streaming section of my RTX 4090 review, however this has been improbable for my workflow and has me placing 40-series playing cards in all of my seize and streaming rigs.

I’m recording most issues to AV1 now to avoid wasting on area. Resolve helps enhancing it with out difficulty now, and the latest Nvidia driver update just improved AV1 decode performance, too! I’m using the additional general headroom to file my display captures in H.265 in 4:4:4 chroma subsampling for lossless punch-ins for my tutorials and for stunning 8K upscales on export. You can view a demo of this here—display seize by no means appeared so good, and I couldn’t do that with out risking body drops and encoder lag even on my RTX 3090.

As with the RTX 4090, recording AV1 in OBS Studio 28.1 (which now supports NVENC AV1 within the public construct) has very minimal efficiency influence in your gameplay, a mere fraction of the hit that H.264 causes. I’ll have extra deeper testing on this coming later./y

Discord can also be getting AV1 streaming assist for Go Live later this month. I examined this and it appears nice, however there’s some quirks to how Discord calls work. Since it’s a “video call,” video is distributed immediately from host to viewers, with no transcoding server or a lot of a middle-man as you’ll have with companies resembling Twitch and YouTube. This implies that each events need to have the identical assist.

So if you happen to’re streaming AV1 to Discord and a viewer joins who doesn’t have the precise driver or {hardware} (presently I’m unclear as as to whether it’s going to require Nvidia playing cards for this replace, or simply GPU AV1 decode assist usually, which would come with AMD and Intel), the stream will likely be pressured to revert to H.264. This might be complicated and messy for group calls however remains to be a giant win to have it built-in. I simply hope we see Arc and Radeon RDNA3 AV1 support added sooner fairly than later—and ideally SVT-AV1 CPU encoding assist, because it’s gotten fairly quick.

Bottom Line: Nvidia’s product stack is complicated

While it felt like a win for Nvidia to “unlaunch” the 12GB 4080—because it by no means ought to have been known as a 4080 within the first place—doing so makes it a lot more durable to grasp Nvidia’s upcoming product stack in context. The GeForce RTX 4080 out-performs the last-gen RTX 3090 in lots of instances, which looks like a win for $1,200, however you’re getting shorted on VRAM in ways in which do begin to matter for high-end work.

Just trying as much as the $1,600 GeForce RTX 4090, the 4080’s efficiency checks out. But the cheaper 12GB… 4070? 4070 Ti? 4080 mini?… that may finally hit the streets may be principally simply nearly as good for this type of work for less expensive, on condition that the RTX 4080’s 16GB of VRAM nonetheless limits super-high-end work. But we received’t know till Nvidia’s subsequent merchandise break cowl.

It’s exhausting to counsel shopping for something proper now till this painfully sluggish season is over—however ready places you in battle with scalpers and shortages and FOMO. It’s powerful. I used to be truthfully hoping the “unlaunch” state of affairs would drive down the worth of each RTX 4080 playing cards a bit, however I suppose that’s not taking place. Either manner, in case your explicit content material creation workflows don’t require greater than 16GB of onboard VRAM, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 delivers some gorgeous efficiency enhancements over its predecessors.