Fast, quiet, cool and efficient don’t have to be mutually exclusive since the launch of the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB, and the MSI RTX 4080 SUPRIM X 16GB is no different. Unfortunately, it is also more, namely currently far too expensive. Even if the ex-factory selling price is already not squeamish, retailers tend to shift the value chain towards the store counter. However, the buyer and the product do not deserve exactly such impertinence, so I will naturally focus on the technical side in today’s review. Always in the hope that there will be better, scalper-free times again and that the market will then please do the rest, including the cutthroats. Graphics cards below MSRP would certainly not be the worst year-end solution as a Christmas present.
Unpack and get to work – those who buy the card get a few nice extras in the scope of delivery. There would be the fuse the 3-pin adapter for old power supply plugs, a mouse pad and of course the card itself along with graphics card holder. Well, you need them, otherwise you literally have a serious problem. But before I go into more detail about the card itself, here’s a little refresher on the chip and the architecture used. It is definitely worthwhile to briefly skim over this once again.
The AD 103 and the new Ada architecture
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is also manufactured in the TSMC 4N process and has 45.9 billion transistors and, I can already spoil, also offers a decent leap in terms of performance, efficiency and also AI-supported graphics, even if the gap to the GeForce RTX 4090 seems almost huge. The Ada architecture relies on up to 7 Graphic Processing Clusters (GPC) and up to 80 new Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) with 10,240 CUDA cores, whose performance and energy efficiency have increased significantly.
In addition, tensor cores of the 4. Generation and Optical Flow, enabling transformative AI technologies including NVIDIA DLSS and the new NVIDIA DLSS 3 frame rate multiplier. The RT cores of the 3. The new generation offers up to 2x ray tracing performance, Shader Execution Reordering (SER) improves ray tracing operations by a factor of two. In addition, NVIDIA now also uses a dual AV1 encoder, with the NVIDIA encoder (NVENC) being the 8th generation. Generation with AV1 is said to work up to 40% more efficiently than H.264.
The AD103-300 of the GeForce RTX 4080 has been limited a bit and still offers 7 GPC in total, but two of them have been cut from 12 to 10 SM and one even to 8 SM. This still results in 76 SM including the 9728 CUDA cores for the chip of the new consumer card. In addition, there are a total of 38 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC), 76 RT cores of the 3rd generation. Generation, 304 4th generation tensor cores. Generation, 304 Texture Units (TU) and 112 ROPs. The L2 cache is 65536 KB in total and the card uses 16 GB of GDDR6X clocked at 11200 MHz on a 256-bit interface, which corresponds to a data rate of 22.4 Gbps and a bandwidth of 716.8 GB/s.
The changes to all three core types can be summarized quite simply:
- Programmable Shader: Ada’s SM includes an important new technology called Shader Execution Reordering (SER) that reorders work on the fly, providing a 2x speedup for ray tracing. SER is as big an innovation as the out-of-order design for CPUs was at the time. 83 shader TFLOPS are quite a statement
- Tensor Cores of the 4. Generation: The new Tensor Core in Ada includes the NVIDIA Hopper FP8 Transformer Engine, which delivers over 1.3 petaFLOPS for AI inference workloads in the RTX 4090. Compared to FP16, FP8 halves data storage requirements and doubles AI performance. The GeForce RTX 4090 thus offers more than twice the total Tensor Core processing power of the RTX 3090 Ti.
- RT Core of the 3. Generation: A new opacity micromap engine accelerates ray tracing of alpha-checked geometries by a factor of 2. Add to this a new micro-mesh engine that handles all the geometric richness without further BVH creation and storage costs. Triangulation throughput is 191 RT-TFLOPS, compared to Ampere’s 78 RTTFLOPS.
The card still relies on a PCIe Gen. 4 interface and only for the external power connection with the 12VHPWR connector (12+4 pin) on an element of the PCIe Gen. 5 specification. The TGP is 320 watts and can also be raised up to 400 watts, depending on the board partner (which is rather pointless because the voltage limits at some point anyway). The extremely oversized cooler will know how to prevent the chip’s maximum permissible 90 °C anyway.
The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPRIM X 16 GB in detail
The FE weighs “only” 2133 grams, the SUPRIM X 2352 grams (measured). The length of 33 cm is already quite decent, the height of 14 cm is unfortunately as well, you need a trum of casing if you have to use the great adapter. The material looks somehow spacey as always and it has once again succeeded in incorporating the familiar SUPRIM design language. Light metal and a bit of plastic, plus a visually successful light metal backplate with luminous accents – a buyer can live with that, even visually.
MSI uses a dual BIOS including silent and gaming mode. The only difference between the two modes is the fan curve, which is a bit less aggressive in Silent mode and also lets the card run a bit “warmer”. But with this giant cooler, even that is more than enough. Power limit and clock rates are identical in both modes. MSI has enabled up to 400 watts for the card, which is rather wasteful in the end, because you will never be able to exploit such values in gaming, not even with OC. Because then, as always, the voltage limits first.
However, you can not only plug power into the card, but also video connections. There are four of them, to be quite precise, as there are: three times DisplayPort 1.4a and once HDMI 2.1a. That is especially a pity for the DisplayPort when it comes to the new specifications. Opportunity missed, unfortunately. And with HDMI, you have to trick with the compression from 4K onwards if you want it to go above 120 Hz. That’s a pity, but it’s not MSI’s fault.
The screenshot from GPU-Z shows us default settings of the gaming mode, which correspond to those of the silent mode except for the higher power limit.
With this, the first page is done and we are slowly preparing for the test.
- 1 - Introduction, unboxing and technical data
- 2 - Test system in the igor'sLAB MIFCOM-PC
- 3 - Teardown: PCB, components and cooler
- 4 - Gaming performance
- 5 - Power consumption and load balancing
- 6 - Peaks, transients and PSU recommendation
- 7 - Temperatures, clock rate, fan speed and noise
- 8 - Efficiency, summary and conclusion
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