Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 is unquestionably powerful, and it's a major improvement over its predecessor with performance blowing the RTX 3090 Ti out of the water, but at nearly double the price of the RTX 3080, you really should just buy the RTX 4090 at this point.

In the end though, NVIDIA’s march forward means the company now has the two GPUs in its latest line-up that dominate any previous-gen offerings. With a starting price of $1,199, GeForce RTX 4080 cards aren’t cheap, but they do undercut the 3090 Ti, while offering superior performance and features. Whether the RTX 4080 remains in this price bracket for long, however, remains to be seen.

The second Lovelace GPU is a 4K heavy hitter, but its price might hinder its popularity with some gaming PC enthusiasts.

All in all, the RTX 4080 is exactly what I'd want from an RTX 3080 Ti successor. It's faster and has plenty of new features to make it a demonstrable leap from the previous cards. I'm not saying you should be upgrading your 3080 anytime soon, but if you somehow stumble onto $1,199, I wouldn't blame you for being tempted by the 4080.

For me, I love the 40 series. It’s the first generation of GPUs that has genuinely got me excited about graphics cards again, and while the 4090 was just a beast, the 4080 still has the same essence as it, but for a lower price. I just hope that supply and demand isn’t an issue and that we see it for $1200 or just under £1300 in the UK, though I do worry, for pure rasterisation, what has AMD got up their sleeves? I guess we’ll have to wait a little longer to see what happens on that front and who comes out victorious.

The RTX 4080 has all the technological advancements of the Ada Lovelace architecture, with a price that's difficult to justify. It's too close to the 4090 to entice extreme performance enthusiasts, and soon it will have to contend with AMD's RX 7900 series. But lots of people prefer Nvidia and want DLSS and are willing to pay the piper his dues.

We've already seen that the RTX 4080 is an outstandingly capable card, easily matching - and regularly beating - the RTX 3090 Ti. How Nvidia have managed to upgrade their already impressive Tensor and RT Cores to give so much extra performance is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The RTX 2080 Ti already out-performed the AMD equivalent in ray tracing performance, and the Ampere cards put significant distance between it and the 2000 series. Now the 4000 series has put the 3000 series in the shade too. Imagine where we'll be in ten years time. Crazy.

MSI's new GeForce RTX 4080 GAMING X TRIO is a fantastic card for any gamer but loses out on the top spot to the SUPRIM X over its backplate and better design. Underneath, however, it still rocks everything that makes the GeForce RTX 4080 a powerful graphics card. No regrets, here! Remember, RDNA 3 is right around the corner.

The RTX 4080 is a more than capable card at 4K and easily outperforms the previous RTX 30-series cards it’s here to replace, but if you’re willing to spend the extra $400, then the RTX 4090 really outshines it at 4K. The gap is much less at 1440p, which is where the 4080 really shines for high refresh rate gaming.