NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE Review – Almost an RTX 3090, but with half of the memory for gamers

1 - Introduction, Unboxing and Test System 2 - Teardown, PCB Analysis and Cooling System 3 - Performance: WQHD and Full-HD plus DXR 4 - Performance: Ultra-HD with and without DLSS / DXR 5 - FPS, Percentiles, Frame Time & Variances 6 - Frame Times vs. Power Draw 7 - Power Consumption: GPU and CPU in all Games 8 - Power Consumption: Effiziency in Detail 9 - Power Consumption: Overview, Summary and measured Details 10 - Standards (PCI SIG), Transients and PSU Recommendation 11 - Temperatures, Boost Clock Rate and Thermal Imaging 12 - Fan Speed, Noise and Audio-Sample 13 - Summary and Conclusion

Let’s start with the FPS values in conjunction with the 1% Low FPS, i.e. looking at the percentiles (which I’ll plot later as a curve over the entire range) in the worst case, since Min-FPS itself doesn’t mean anything. There’s always a little cough. What the GeForce RTX 3080 FE Ti delivers here is already brute even on WQHD and even confronts the GeForce RTX 3090 FE with real problems in many games. With the same power limit for the entire card, the RTX 3080 Ti has almost 30 more watts available, which fall victim to the huge memory of 24 GB on the big card.

This dominance is not quite as extreme in UHD later on, but both cards are already so close to each other that a different chip quality should also be noticeable here in addition to the power limit. In the games where the RTX 3080 Ti FE is ahead, its boost clock is also slightly higher than that of the RTX 3980 FE and initial tests have shown that this RTX 3080 Ti FE in particular runs really well, while the RTX 3090 with its more curved package is more of a potato. Which again shows that you should also price in the chip lottery.

If you activate the ray tracing reflections on Ultra in Watch Dogs Legion and omit DLSS (which hardly makes sense as an upscaler in FHD), the RTX 3090 is even just behind. I have given this several times and always end up with the same result. But since it only stood out so much in this game and this resolution, I just included it in the review. Because in general, the GeForce RTX 3090 does not cut quite such a happy figure in Full HD anymore.