Introduction

ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 Super OC is the company’s top of the line custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA’s latest enthusiast-segment GPU. The new GeForce RTX 4080 Super crowns the three-part Super branded refresh of the company’s RTX 40-series product stack. It is meant for maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD, including with ray tracing; as well as extreme refresh-rate e-sports competitive gameplay. The new GeForce RTX 4080 Super is positioned above the original RTX 4080, which is now being retired from NVIDIA’s lineup. As its replacement, you are being offered better performance from a slightly better specs sheet, but more importantly, a 20% reduction in price. While the RTX 4080 launched at $1,200, the RTX 4080 Super launches at a $1,000 baseline. What this means is that premium custom design cards such as the ASUS ROG Strix that we’re reviewing today, would be offered at prices comparable to some of the more close-to-baseline custom design RTX 4080 boards from a year ago.

The GeForce RTX 4080 Super is meant to be a slightly spruced up RTX 4080 at a better price. It is based on the same AD103 silicon as the RTX 4080, but while the original stopped short of maxing out all shaders available on the silicon, the new RTX 4080 Super goes the full measure. The AD103 silicon has 80 streaming multiprocessors, all of which are enabled on the RTX 4080 Super, giving it the full counts of 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs; and the chip’s full 112 ROPs and 64 MB of L2 cache. This is a roughly 5% increase in shaders and other key components over the RTX 4080. The memory sub-system is largely unchanged—16 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 256-bit memory interface, but the memory speed is slightly increased to 23 Gbps, from the 22.4 Gbps of the RTX 4080. The TGP, or the de facto power limit, is unchanged from 320 W.

The GeForce Super brand of mid-lifecycle refreshes are an exercise in increasing the performance at existing or lower price points, rather than a change in the feature-set. The underlying technology is still the Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, built on the 5 nm EUV foundry node. The new Ada generation CUDA core, besides increases in IPC and clock speed headroom, supports shader execution reordering, which should enhance ray tracing performance; the new 3rd generation RT core supports displaced micro-meshes, a feature that allows game developers to increase the geometric detail of ray traced objects. The optical flow accelerator is a component that allows DLSS 3 Frame Generation to work, drawing entire alternate frames using AI, without involving the main graphics rendering pipeline.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 Super OC retains the iconic cyberpunk design that the company debuted in late-2022 with this generation. It is a vast three-slot cooler with massive fans, a heavy heatsink, and a vapor chamber plate. This card features the largest variant of the current generation ROG Strix cooling solution, which the company uses on its RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 ROG Strix products. This is heavier than the cooler that it uses on the ROG Strix RTX 4070 Ti Super OC. The custom design card is designed to squeeze the most performance out of the RTX 4080 Super out of the box, as well as enabling the highest overclocking headroom possible with air cooling for this GPU. ASUS is asking $1250 for the ROG Strix RTX 4080 Super, a rather hefty premium over the NVIDIA MSRP.