RTX 4080 vs RTX 4090

Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture for better or worse seems to be the de facto winner this generation as it decimates the competition from a resurgent AMD and an entry-level focused Intel Arc lineup. Nvidia’s release calendar has been top-heavy with the RTX 4090 followed by the RTX 4080 and the subsequent RTX 4070TI showing up first. While there are more RTX cards in play, much of the focus falls onto Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090 and its cut-down sibling, the RTX 4080, both of which command an MSRP greater than $1000.

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  ASUS TUF GeForce RTX® 4090 OC Edition

  The Best Overall RTX 4090

  The ASUS TUF GeForce RTX® 4090 OC Edition is a premium RTX 4090 SKU that offers some of the best vapor chamber cooling on offer in the industry coupled with industry-grade electronics to ensure a highly overclockable RTX 4090 GPU that delivers on both the performance and reliability counts for end-users.

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  ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX® 4080 OC Edition

  The Best Overall RTX 4080

  The ASUS TUF RTX 4080 OC edition is a solid entry for an RTX 4080 GPU and matches up with the MSRP of Nvidia’s own Founders Edition (FE) in terms of price thanks to a price cut by Asus. It has an excellent boost clock and maintains low operating temperatures thanks to the vapor-chamber centric design.

Competing Products

While the RTX 4090 commands its massive price tag by simply offering the fastest GPU experience money can buy, things are not so clear-cut for the RTX 4080 which is taken on directly by AMD’s competing RX 7900 XTX that tends to beat it comprehensively but fails to push its advantage when it comes to Ray Tracing (RT); Here Nvidia’s massive investment in RT tech begins to show as it pulls ahead in essentially every benchmark that compares them head to head.

With The RTX 4080 enjoying as much as a 50% lead in FPS when benchmarked by the gold standard for RT gaming, Cyberpunk 2077, versus the 7900 XTX, the RTX 4080 might still be the best GPU to buy at the sub $1k mark if Ray Tracing is on a user’s list of requirements; and at the price spent, it should be.

The RTX 4000 series started tracking with Steam’s hardware survey statistics in Jan 2023. The RTX 4090 has outsold its smaller sibling by ~58% and the relatively newer RTX 4070TI seems to be nipping at the RTX 4080’s heels from a better price point too, nearly catching up to it when it comes to adoption on Steam’s hardware survey (pictured above).

The RTX 4090 has no illusions of having any competition to beat for now. It comes to the table as the fastest mainstream GPU users can buy for gaming, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. This also reflects in terms of consumer demand. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are somewhat controlled in supply by Nvidia to allow prices to remain stable thanks to a slew of crypto-mining GPUs entering the market as miners continue to dump stock en masse. Despite these factors, Consumers overwhelmingly pick the RTX 4090 over the RTX 4080 despite the price gap.

This is primarily due to the RTX 4090 being considerably more powerful for one. The RTX 4080’s price does it no favors either. Consumers and reviewers alike feel it is priced too close to the RTX 4090 while not offering similar value for money despite both GPUs being pricey offerings by Nvidia. With the introduction of the RTX 4070TI at a more palatable $799, we expect the adoption numbers to further skew in favor of Nvidia’s higher and lower-end (relatively) RTX 4000 offerings over time.

For now, it seems the RTX 4090’s nearest competitor is Nvidia’s own RTX 4080 since there are no comparable GPUs in play that can come within spitting distance of the RTX 4090 currently. AMD’s 7900 XTX does make an effort but generally falls short of the 4080 when Ray Tracing or DLSS and FSR (AMD’s answer to DLSS) come into play.

Head-to-head comparison

The Nvidia RTX 4090 flexes its massive 16,384 CUDA cores versus the RTX 4080’s 9728 CUDA cores. This makes its performance proposition one that has never been seen before from Nvidia’s consumer-grade GPUs. The RTX 4080 is no slouch either. It comes quite close in CUDA core count to the RTX 3090 (10496) and RTX 3090TI (10752) and beats both comprehensively in real-world performance thanks to its considerable core clock advantage as it pushes past the 2GHz barrier with ease compared to the more restricted last-gen Ampere GPUs.

Both GPUs support Nvidia’s Proprietary DLSS 3 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and prior implementations as well as Nvidia’s latest frame-gen technologies to boot. Both GPUs are built on a 4nm manufacturing process featuring 3rd generation RT cores and 4th generation Tensor cores in addition to overhauled streaming multiprocessors that Nvidia claims are twice as fast and efficient in ideal conditions.

The biggest difference between the two GPUs apart from the GPU core is how its GDDR6X memory is implemented. Thanks to the wider 384-bit bus, the RTX 4090 can push as much as 1,008 GB/s in speed across 24GB of memory while the RTX 4080 with its much tamer 256bit bus pushes as much as 716.8 GB/s in memory speed across 16GB, both of which are sufficient for their respective GPU’s needs.

The RTX 4090: The Best, But At Significant Cost

There is no denying that the RTX 4090 is by far the most powerful GPU Nvidia has ever built and, despite its monstrous ask, if people are willing to pay well north of $2000 at times for an RTX 3090TI, the RTX 4090 is not looking for a new market; it is simply addressing users willing to pay the premium for using the best-in-class technologies that money can buy. The RTX 4090 for the most part is a quiet performer that can boost quite well with the right thermal solution coupled with hardware designed to assist the overclocking process.

Our Best RTX 4090 Performance Pick

Our performance pick for the best RTX 4090 also happens to be our featured pick for this comparison; The reasons are many, but can be summed up in one word: Performance. The RTX 4090 is all about raw performance and power under the hood that no other GPU can match and only the MSI Suprim X or the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC truly qualify as SKUs that can go the extra mile in terms of clock speed and cooling potential when it comes to their thermal solutions.

RELATED: The Best RTX 4090 GPUs

Our test unit regularly boosted to 3.2 GHz before dropping to sub 2.9-3.0 GHz during our tests running Hogwarts Legacy maxed out at 4K. That would make it one of the highest boost speeds with stable performance that we have seen from any RTX 4090 manufacturer. Based on various user reviews available online, many other users have similar findings. The RTX 4090 Strix OC is just that good and with the option to manually tweak the card to sub 600W power limits versus its average load consumption of sub 450W, though the card can creep up to sub 520W fairly easily if allowed to boost during gaming sessions.

The RTX 4080: The Middle Child With Solid Performance

The RTX 4080, despite being overlooked thanks to the shock and awe performance by the RTX 4090, is still an excellent performer, albeit with plenty of flack being thrown its way because of the price point it commands. At the core value proposition of its AD103 chip is an extremely fast GPU that clocks up to the 4090’s levels easily even if it has lesser muscle than its elder brother.

It also has no equals in the last generation save the pricey RTX 3090TI in some rasterized titles and even that is not a fair fight. Anything that implements DLSS 2 or RT tends to perform far better on the RTX 4080 than the last generation RTX 3090TI and DLSS 3, changing the name of the game altogether, with the RTX 4080 posting as much as a 2x to 3x gain over the last generation flagship on titles such as Microsoft Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk 2077 to name a few.

Our Best RTX 4080 Value Pick

The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4080 16GB AMP Extreme AIRO offers an excellent penultimate RTX 4000 series experience for a premium SKU that already trades well below MSRP for the RTX 4080. Apart from the exceptional value on offer, it brings high boost clocks, a premium vapor chamber design, and excellent RGB lighting on offer to make it one of the best SKUs gamers and enthusiasts can pick.

RELATED: The Best RTX 4080 GPUs

At the same time, the large $300 discount over its own MSRP on Amazon makes it an excellent deal to pick up. Even if it doesn’t take the crown for the fastest RTX 4080 out there, it comes considerably closer than most SKUs. With nearly 10,000 Cuda cores in play, excellent cooling on offer and some of the best thermals in the business, the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 4080 16GB AMP Extreme AIRO is Ada Lovelace at its finest, even as it makes for a more price-sensitive upgrade than some of its more pricey competition.

Conclusion

The RTX 4090 and the RTX 4080 and their respective AIB variants are both capable GPUs and both of these will remain relevant for gaming for the foreseeable future. In a nutshell, both can run any game thrown at them with an acceptable performance from both GPUs on the most demanding titles, especially if they get to punch back with a DLSS 3.0 solution in tow.

With DLSS 3.0 coming to more titles consistently, it is expected that Nvidia’s Frame-gen tech will feature in both new and unreleased as well as older titles extensively, and having an RTX 4000 series GPU might just be the best purchase PC players can make this year. Here, the RTX 4090 does have an edge: It will be the fastest RTX 4000 series card for the foreseeable future, or at the very least, most of 2023, making it a better purchase, given the price points of some of the more premium RTX 4080 units fast approaching RTX 4090 Founders Edition price points.

And even if that was not the case, there is no denying that the RTX 4090 is simply just a faster card, and no aftermarket RTX 4080 can surpass even the Founders Edition variant with ease. The RTX 4080 has a more confused value proposition as it competes with the RTX 4070TI which offers a better price: performance at a much more approachable price at the door. It is also why the RTX 4070TI is our de facto pick for the best Nvidia GPUs to buy in 2023.

This is not to say that the RTX 4080 does not have value or a place in the market; just that it does happen to be in a market segment that might be quite thin: People who need (and can splurge on) something better than an RTX 4070TI but can not afford an RTX 4090 making it a GPU with limited appeal especially considering the huge jump in performance to the current Ada Lovelace flagship for a $400 MSRP price premium.

FAQ

Q: Is the RTX 4090 faster than the RTX 4080?

Yes and considerably so. It comes with more CUDA cores, Stream processors, RT Cores, memory bandwidth, and capacity, and a marginally higher clock out of the box that can see it post double-digit gains easily versus its smaller sibling.

Q: Is the RTX 4080 or 4090 worth getting?

If you like to have access to the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to GPUs and gaming, yes. DLSS 3.0 is poised to be a game-changer and both of these GPUs benefit greatly from the enhancements it brings to the board. Lower temperatures, better coolers, and more efficient performance are also key benefits when you get an RTX 4090 or an RTX 4080 GPU.

Q: What Are The Best RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 discounts on offer currently?

While the Nvidia RTX 4090 rarely goes on discount, it does have budget-centric SKUs in play. Some of the best value-added RTX 4090s can be seen on Game Rant’s regularly updated RTX 4090 guide.

Users needing an RTX 4080 however have more luck in play thanks to it getting regular discounts that get plenty of comprehensive coverage as part of a dedicated buyer’s guide from Game Rant.