Introduction

Galax GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER SG is a premium custom design graphics card by one of the most popular board vendors by volume in Asia, which also retails as KFA2 in certain markets. The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is now NVIDIA’s second fastest GPU, positioned below the RTX 4090 flagship. It is being launched to help NVIDIA consolidate its leadership over the $1,000 price point, at which it can better compete with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX which can be spotted around the $900 mark. Since the RTX 4090 faces no competition from AMD, NVIDIA focused instead of shoring up the performance and pricing of its second best SKU. The RTX 4080 SUPER very much is an enthusiast segment GPU, designed for 4K Ultra HD gameplay at maxed out settings, including with ray tracing.

To create the RTX 4080 SUPER, NVIDIA simply maxed out the AD103 silicon that was powering the RTX 4080, enabling all 80 SM compared to the 76 on the older card; but more importantly, reducing its pricing baseline by 20%, which is really the biggest change here. With all 80 SM enabled, the RTX 4080 SUPER gets 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs, and all 112 ROPs present on the silicon. It also gets the full 64 MB of on-die cache, and 16 GB of 23 Gbps GDDR6X memory across the chip’s full 256-bit memory interface. The memory sub-system is largely carried over from the RTX 4080.

The underlying Ada graphics architecture is still the same. It introduces generational uplifts in performance and energy efficiency, thanks to the new 5 nm EUV foundry process, and SIMD-level innovations. The new Ada CUDA core, in addition to IPC increases and support for higher clock speeds over Ampere; features support for shader execution reordering, a feature that improves ray tracing performance. The new 3rd generation RT core supports displaced micro-meshes, a feature that increases complexity of ray traced objects without a linear increase in performance cost; and the new optical flow accelerator, a component that lets the GPU draw entire alternate frames using AI, without involving the main graphics rendering pipeline, which is needed for DLSS 3 Frame Generation to work.

Galax RTX 4080 SUPER SG is a heavily spruced up custom design, which is draped in rich RGB LED lighting. It offers factory overclocked speeds of 2610 MHz, compared to 2550 MHz reference. Its large four-slot cooling solution banks on three large fans. There is a package of accessories such as a 4th fan that can be strapped onto the backplate, and an RGB illuminated supporting brace that counteracts PCB bending over time. We didn’t get any pricing from Galax, so we’re estimating a price point of $1,050 for this card, a $50 premium over the NVIDIA MSRP.