Nvidia RTX 4080 Graphics Card Review

Ray Tracing & DLSS

Now while the lower resolutions did show some pretty significant restrictions due to processor performance, and the fact that the 4080 is just so fast, even at 4K, we do find ourselves with some form of bottlenecking in the likes of Microsoft Flight Sim and while not everyone is able to buy a better processor, or to wait for a new processor that doesn’t exist yet, there are other ways to bypass those restrictions, and that’s where DLSS comes in and the 40 series from NVIDIA take that one step further too, with DLSS 3. Now for those of you who don’t know,  DLSS 3 is the latest upscaling technology that NVIDIA are bringing to the table as a successor to the previous generations of DLSS, 1, 2, 2.4 and so on, and this is now made possible by the next level in AI computing to create additional frames within game by way of the new optical flow accelerator, only found on the RTX 40 series, in addition to the existing DLSS features like super-resolution coupled with NVIDIA Reflex.

Now, support is still somewhat thin on the ground, but more and more titles are starting to implement it along with the likes of Ray Tracing for that extra level of immersion within game.

To get an idea of what kind of performance changes we get with the likes of Ray Tracing and DLSS, we tested a total of 7 titles, of which some support Ray Tracing, some support DLSS and some support DLSS 3 to give a much clearer picture of what these features mean for your overall experience.

So starting things off with A Plague Tale: Requiem where the 4080 was already 29% faster in pure rasterisation compared to the 3080 Ti and 15% faster than the 3090 Ti. When enabling DLSS in performance mode, we see that gain increase slightly to 31% over the 3080 Ti and 17% over the 3090 Ti, so some small gains to be seen comparatively like for like, though when enabling DLSS 3, we actually see the performance on the 4080 increase by 32% compared to not having frame generation turned on with the same card.

This also means that compared to the 3080 Ti with the older DLSS technology, we now see a huge 74% improvement on the 4080 with DLSS 3, and an equally impressive 55% improvement over the 3090 Ti with DLSS set to performance mode.

In Control, the RTX 4080 was already 26% ahead of the 3080 Ti and 19% ahead of the 3090 Ti with no Ray Tracing or DLSS enabled which was pretty impressive to start. With Ray Tracing enabled, the FPS did drop significantly due to how demanding this game can be, but still saw a 16% lead over the 3080 Ti and a much smaller but still impressive 4% compared to last generation’s flagship GPU.

With Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled the RTX 4080 shot up compared to having DLSS disabled by 93%, though more interestingly, it now puts the 4080 with a 23% lead over the 3080 Ti and 10% lead over the 3090 Ti. So just imagine if this game had DLSS 3.

In Cyberpunk, the RTX 4080 was already dominating with a 40% lead over the 3080 Ti, and 27% lead over the 3090 Ti, while Ray Tracing saw all cards we tested taking a hammering as expected. When enabling DLSS along with Ray Tracing, the performance on the RTX 4080 manages to push 27% ahead of the 3080 Ti and 15% ahead of the 3090 Ti, showing that those newer RT and Tensor cores really are making a difference in comparative performance.

Enabling DLSS 3 however, just puts it into a whole different realm of performance which sees the RTX 4080 gain another 44% of performance over the previous generation of DLSS on the same card. This also means that the RTX 4080 now pushes another 66% more frames per second compared to the 3090 Ti and 83% more than the 3080 Ti.

In Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed, which is a a new game that we wanted to check DLSS 3 performance on, we again see a 13% lead in pure rasterisation performance favoured to the RTX 4080 over the 3080 Ti, while DLSS actually saw something very interesting where both the 3080 Ti and 3090 Ti came in with better results, albeit by a few frames per second. It’s very similar behavior to CPU bottleneck, and was extremely odd to see.

Luckily DLSS 3 comes in to save the day and sees the performance on the RTX 4080 jump by 23% over the older version of DLSS along with boosting performance to 21% over the 3080 Ti and 19% over the 3090 Ti.

In Spider-Man, we already had a healthy lead of 21% in favour to the RTX 4080 against the 3080 Ti, and with Ray Tracing turned on, that lead remained stable at 28%, which is very impressive to see, while enabling DLSS sees that lead shrink to just 3% over the 3080 Ti.

Again, enabling DLSS 3 gives us a 50% lead on the 4080 with the previous version of DLSS, while compared to the 3080 Ti, we now see a HUGE 45% uplift in performance comparing each respective model’s DLSS technology. Putting the 3090 Ti back in the mix, and the RTX 4080 now comes in 40% faster in this game with DLSS 3 enabled.

Microsoft Flight Sim was the one game that really showed how clearly evident the CPU bottleneck was and on all cards tested, we saw no difference when enabling DLSS, other than a few frames per second that could be argued as margin of error. It was only when enabling DLSS 3 on the RTX 4080 that we saw that limitation being smashed, at 109 FPS. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate that. Microsoft Flight Sim at 4K, on Ultra, doing 109 frames per second. That now puts it 87% better than the 3090 Ti with DLSS turned on. Wow.

Lastly in Watch Dogs: Legion, we already see the 4080 coming in around 29% faster than the 3080 Ti and 18% faster than the 3090 Ti, while enabling Ray Tracing saw the FPS dip on all cards, but still saw the RTX 4080 keeping a 28% and 16% lead respectively.

Enabling DLSS again sees that gain keeping consistent at 26% over the 3080 Ti and 17% over the RTX 3090 Ti.