Msi Rtx 3080 Ti Review

This review will focus on the flagship 3080 Ti from MSI, the SUPRIM X series. The MSI RTX 3080 TI SUPRIM X boasts an 1845 MHz boost clock and 1830 MHz out of the box. The SUPRIM X model also features a TDP of 400W, which is 50W over reference specs. In return, you'll gain more performance, bringing the series even closer and sometimes passing 3090 performance. MSI equipped the card with a semi-passive design; the three fans start to spin and cool once the GPU warms up.

Make no mistake; both modes offer the same performance; just a marginal difference in temperatures and acoustics can be perceived. SUPRIM X has been fitted with a new TRI FROZR cooling solution with three TORX 4.0 fans. New in the design is that it has close quarters heat pipes around the VRM and a backplate .

Nvidia is promising big things with its new generation of graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 3080 is supposed to deliver twice the performance of the RTX 2080 at the same price. It's even supposed to surpass the RTX 2080 Ti, providing solid 4K gaming performance for much less than Nvidia's last-generation cards cost. This is all while taking advantage of ray tracing and Nvidia's special AI-powered DLSS tech that boosts frame rates while maintaining image quality. Final word, if this was a normal GPU situation, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would be the card to get if you wanted the top of the line gaming card and had the money to spend.

It keeps the two slot cooling solution of the RTX 3080 with performance close to the RTX 3090 but keeps that card's power requirements. While more expensive than I feel like it should be, it does dole out the speed that will make all current games and future games perform incredibly well. The increase in RAM over the RTX 3080, while only 2GB, should make those wanting more RAM in their flagship card happy. It doesn't match the 16GB that AMD cards provide in their top of the line cards, but at 4K I don't think you'll run into any memory issues for now or in the foreseeable future. Also, it is using GDDR6X memory versus GDDR6, which is faster and costs more. Rainbow Six Siegestill dominates the Steam charts years after its launch, and Ubisoft supports it with frequent updates and events.

The developers have poured a ton of work into the game's AnvilNext engine over the years, eventually rolling out a Vulkan version of the game that we use to test. By default, the game lowers the render scaling to increase frame rates, but we set it to 100 percent to benchmark native rendering performance on graphics cards. Godfall is a large-scale open-world action RPG, full of reflective surfaces and advanced light effects. Unlike Control, it's optimised to run ray tracing on AMD, rather than Nvidia graphics cards, which is the reason it doesn't support DLSS at the moment. Here, the 3080 Ti once again proved capable of running the game at playable frame rates across every resolution. While the door is left open for something a little more powerful than the RTX 3080, Nvidia has some special tricks to improve performance and even image quality.

When I originally reviewed the RTX 2080 two years ago, I wasn't able to test ray tracing or DLSS, Nvidia's AI super sampling technology. Back then, Nvidia was promising these tricks would eventually improve visual quality and frame rates, and add prettier cinematic effects in games. But there weren't any games at the RTX 2080 launch to back up Nvidia's claims, so they sounded like vague promises for the future. So far, we've focused on gaming performance using traditional rasterization graphics.

We've also excluded using Nvidia's DLSS technology in order to provide an apples-to-apples comparison. Let's change things up for a moment and look at ray tracing performance, with and without DLSS 2.0, where applicable. We're only showing DLSS results on the 3080 Ti, and we used the Quality mode in the six games where it was supported. AMD's FSR will provide an alternative to DLSS in the coming months, though we don't yet have hands-on experience with it, so we can't comment on the image quality. We'll also confine testing to 1440p and 1080p here since native 4K with ray tracing tends to push even the fastest GPUs beyond their reasonable limits.

This is the same testing we used in our recent AMD vs. Nvidia Ray Tracing Battle. Here, the RTX 3080 Ti once again ran the game at more than playable frame rates at every resolution with its graphics settings maxed. The game doesn't have an internal benchmark, so we gauge performance by taking an average frame rate while playing through the open section of the first level. It takes the throne of the fastest PC gaming graphics card with nothing coming even close to it. It's surprisingly much faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which is its Turing based predecessor but just being fast isn't enough for a card of this scale or price.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti carries more cores, more memory, higher performance efficiency, and also carries next-generation ray-tracing and tensor cores that make this a truly next-generation graphics card. That's a huge difference, but Control hits the RTX cards right where it matters most. So the extra video memory in the 3080 Ti is more adept at rendering a 4K scene with ray tracing and graphics set to maximum with no DLSS.

Of course, the 80 RT cores and 10,240 CUDA cores also make a huge difference. The reality is that Control is now very playable at 4K with max settings for RTX even before you turn on DLSS thanks to the 3080 Ti. We test a variety of games spanning various engines, genres, vendor sponsorships , and graphics APIs . We've also enabled temporal anti-aliasing to push these cards to their limits.

We run each benchmark at least three times and list the average result for each test. You can see a very clear hierarchy in the amount of resources devoted to each off-the-shelf product, with everything you see in this list still being produced and still sold… where there is at least inventory. Not much in the history of NVIDIA We saw such a quick launch attachment that included seven video cards from the same series. The interesting thing is that the desire for performance is higher than the desire to produce graphics cards with an extremely low heat envelope.

Almost all new graphics cards from NVIDIA Rated 200W or more of heat casing. Still, 4K gaming is absolutely here at playable frame rates for a much more affordable price. That's a big jump, and it will hopefully influence the price of 4K monitors to improve the affordability aspect even further.

You had to pay $1,199 for just a graphics card to even get close to this level of performance with the RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 3080 offers impressive 4K performance for its $699 price point. NVIDIA designed the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, not just for any gamer but all gamers who want to have the best 4K graphics performance at hand to power the next-generation of AAA gaming titles with superb visuals and insane fluidity. It's not just the FPS that matters these days, it's visuals, and a smoother frame rate too and this is exactly what the GeForce RTX 30 series is made to excel at. There's a lot to talk about regarding NVIDIA's flagship Ampere gaming graphics cards so let's start off with the specifications.

Near the three-pin power connector, MSI has added a BIOS selector switch that lets you choose between Gaming and Silent modes. Both have the same clock speed, but Gaming Mode allows the fans to ramp a little higher to keep the card cool. In this mode, the card peaked at 68C after repeat runs of Unigine Heaven and hovered closer to 65C when playing actual games.

This was also in a hot 26C office, so I would expect the card to run cooler in an air conditioned setting. In Silent Mode, this ramped to 72C but I honestly didn't find it necessary. The cooling system is performant enough that it never needed to ramp the fans up obnoxiously high and was on par, if not a bit better, than the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition in acoustic performance.

Nvidia pitted the RTX 3080 against the RTX 2080 Ti when running Doom Eternal at 4K on Ultra settings. The RTX 3080 is some 50 percent faster than the last top-end Nvidia graphics card, delivering frame rates well above 100fps. The latest iteration of our GAMING TRIO Series design has been refreshed with a new look while maintaining the same great balance between performance, cooling, and low-noise that gamers have come to trust. At the forefront is the TORX Fan 4.0 design with pairs of fan blades bound together with an outer link, forming a rim that focuses airflow into the updated TRI FROZR 2 cooling system. A matte-finish backplate not only reinforces the graphics card, but provides passive cooling action through the implementation of thermal pads. Mystic Light adorns the exterior of the graphics card, illuminating color in synchrony with the rest of the PC through Mystic Light Sync and Ambient Link, all controlled with the MSI Center software utility.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI is announcing new graphics cards powered by NVIDIA®'s newly-launched GeForce® RTX™ 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti GPUs. Three designs are available for both GPUs – SUPRIM, GAMING TRIO, and VENTUS 3X – and collectively they form the MSI GeForce RTX 30 Ti graphics card family. Built with the MSI essentials, all of our newly announced graphics card products have excellent cooling, optimized circuit board designs, and the latest in graphics card componentry.

Much like the high-end cards are all based on the same GA102 GPU, the 3070 Ti, 3070 and 3060 Ti are all derived from the GA104 GPU, with active cores, memory configs etc. defining performance and price. The 3070 Ti effectively represents the best you can get from a GA104, with every core active and running at a high clock speed. The only way NVIDIA could've made the 3070 Ti stronger would have been to base it on the GA102, which is a far larger chip that costs NVIDIA more money.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti tops the incredible RTX 3080 and while I don't have the RTX 3090, it looks like it's close to that card as well when I compare my results to other outlets' tests. One of the best games of 2019,Metro Exodusremains one of the best-looking games around, too. The latest version of the 4A Engine provides incredibly luscious, ultra-detailed visuals, with one of the most stunning real-time ray tracing implementations released yet. The Extreme graphics preset we benchmark can melt even the most powerful modern hardware, as you'll see below, though the game's Ultra and High presets still look good at much higher frame rates. As ever, the main difference between the Founder's Edition of the graphics card and the AIBs is the cooling solution.

The RTX 3080 Ti uses the same 2-slot design as the RTX 3080, rather than the three-slot design of the RTX 3090 FE. Sadly the RTX 3080 Ti Founder's Edition has the same drawback, so this is a consideration potential buyers of this card will have to weigh up. There isn't generally a big difference between different AIBs of the same card graphics card model. The price gap between 'premium' selections from the more budget offerings, does typically represent a fair value of the card.

An interesting macro image is that of the capacitor composition behind the graphic core itself. When the RTX 30 series was launched NVIDIA, There were users who received that their computer system crashes when changing from rest mode to game effort mode. According to many, it was the capacitor composition of the video card and associated with the graphics core itself. It has been said that in some designs there is no good balance between capacitance and response time and current supply. The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti is one of the most powerful graphics cards I've tested in quite some time, offering stellar 4K performance across the board, even with ray tracing graphics settings on. But its price makes it a very expensive luxury, with better value found elsewhere.

The only slight pause I have here is the 10GB of memory available on the RTX 3080. While Nvidia says the average game uses 4 to 6GB of memory at 4K at the moment, I do fear this will jump a lot closer to maxing out the RTX 3080 memory for future games if you want the very best settings. I might not normally have such a concern with a new card, but given the next-gen consoles are pushing 4K gaming, improved CPUs, and ray tracing, we're bound to see game developers push recommended specs even further in the years ahead. Max settings and performance are always a delicate balance, but I would have loved to have seen 12GB here.

The TGP for the card is set to be slightly higher than the RTX 3080 at 350 Watts. That's definitely needed to feed the extra cores so NVIDIA might have to optimize the clocks a bit here. In terms of performance, the graphics card is said to be as fast as the RTX 3090 but with half the memory & LHR technology-enabled. As for compute numbers, the RTX 3080 Ti features 34 shader TFLOPs, 67 RT-TFLOPs, & 273 Tensor TFLOPs . Instead of a marginally higher price than the RTX 3080, the MSRP is 70% higher and the RTX 3080 Ti is only about 10–12% faster on average. Plus, as we mentioned above, the Founders Edition cooler can't keep up with the additional GPU cores and GDDR6X memory.

No doubt that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a 4K gaming-capable graphics card. Even with ultra graphics or the highest graphics settings, it was able to drive all game titles above 60fps in 3480×2160 resolution. At 4K resolution, the RTX 3080 Ti offers around 13%, on average, performance increase from the RTX 3080.

The arrival of the Ampere generation did a lot to diminish the awkwardness or fiddly nature of 4K gaming, but the RTX 3080 Ti truly squashes it. Setting up for high performance 4K gaming remains a pricey investment, but you needn't be as cautious as we once had to be on a game-by-game basis. You can relatively comfortably set your game to high or ultra settings and get comfortable, even high, frame rates at 4K. Like I opined in my original review, most gamers would absolutely be better served picking up an RTX 3080 as soon as they can find one at MSRP. Yet, if you have your heart set on a 3080 Ti, there is no mistaking that this is an excellent choice that is clearly ready to be pushed further with a custom overclock.

It's just a shame that pricing is so high because while this card may just be the best "gaming" card on the market right now, it's so cost-prohibitive that it's hard to recommend to anyone other than high-level enthusiasts. That said, price to performance value has always gone out the window when it comes to the upper echelons of graphics cards, so those looking for the best of the best typically are prepared to pay for it. The final piece of the performance puzzle is clock speed, and the RTX 3080 is a match for the RTX 2080 here, at least on boost speed.

The specs above do show the reference-level speeds, it should be noted; the RTX 2080 Founders Edition had a 90MHz higher boost clock than reference, but Nvidia isn't doing any such shenanigans with this launch. The lower base clock suggests a less aggressive curve on the new part, but generally speaking, Nvidia is running a hell of a lot more hardware at the same clock speeds. Demand for the 3080 Ti will likely match that of the 3080 — at least among hardcore gamers. This is a powerful, 4K graphics card with a suite of great features as well as enough speedy GDDR6X memory to demolish productivity tasks and ray tracing workloads.

NVIDIA DLSS is a groundbreaking AI rendering technology that increases graphics performance using dedicated Tensor Core AI processors on GeForce RTX GPUs. NVIDIA DLSS taps into the power of a deep learning neural network to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for your games. If you desire ultra performance in gaming, ray-traced workloads, rendering, and GPU-accelerated applications, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the graphics card for you. Brad Chacos/IDGAMD's rival Radeon RX 6900 XT, on the other hand, packs in more raw capacity—16GB—but of the slower GDDR6 variety across a smaller 256-bit bus, so it only has an effectively memory bandwidth of 512GBps. That's a bit deceiving though, as AMD's RDNA 2 architecture includes a very high bandwidth "Infinity Cache" right on the GPU die itself that can handle many frame buffer tasks without needing to access the graphics card's memory. Nvidia's cards lack a similar feature and rely on the raw power of GDDR6X over a wider bus.

In practice, however, all of these high-end GeForce and Radeon cards deliver plenty of bandwidth and performance for 4K gaming. The most important thing to look at is the CUDA core count, as that's a key indicator of performance for Nvidia's graphics cards. With a whopping 10,240 cores, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti isn't much of a cut-down GPU—the RTX 3090 has 10,496. Our benchmarks will show it leaving the vanilla 3080 in the dust and landing right next to the 3090 in raw gaming performance. The build quality of Gigabyte AIBs is generally of a good standard and this GPU is no exception.

This also reduces noise when using the graphics card generally, and it is among the quieter RTX 3080 Tis available. The cooling is of a good standard and brings some piece of mind that the card will last the distance and not lose efficiency over time like the Founder's Edition. Although not always the case, often lesser-known brands end up using thermal solutions that lag behind those of premium competitors, leading to an effective cap on the boost clock speed. The biggest variation in different AIBs of the same graphics card tends to come from the clock speed. Clock speed, or clock rate, is the speed at which your microprocessor operates . For all intents and purposes, this specification lets us know how fast your GPU will perform instructions and render graphics, so is a core consideration in the performance of a card.