Introduction

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC is the company’s most affordable custom design graphics card based on the RTX 4080 SUPER. The Gaming OC brand in Gigabyte’s product stack sits below the Eagle OC series, and the company’s coveted AORUS Gaming series. Graphics cards in the Gaming OC series are targeted at those who care more about the GPU and its performance baseline than the bells and whistles of premium custom design cards; even though the card we are reviewing today isn’t coming in at the NVIDIA MSRP, but rather at a tiny premium. The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER concludes NVIDIA’s Winter 2023-24 mid-lifecycle refresh of the upper end of its GeForce RTX 40-series Ada generation. It is designed for maxed out AAA gaming at 4K Ultra HD, including with ray tracing.

The GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series story so far has been that of delivering more performance at existing price points. For the RTX 4070 SUPER, this meant 21% more shaders and a notable performance uplift displacing the RTX 4070 from its $600 price-point. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER got a significant memory upgrade to 16 GB from 12 GB, and a 10% increase in shaders, replacing the RTX 4070 Ti at the $800 price-point. Things are slightly different with the RTX 4080 SUPER. It gets a roughly 5% increase in shaders by maxing out the existing AD103 silicon that the RTX 4080 is based on; but the price-point itself is lowered by 20%, now down to $1,000 from the $1,200 MSRP that the RTX 4080 debuted at.

NVIDIA probably felt it could afford to design the RTX 4080 SUPER the way it did, instead of the other more expensive approach of tapping into the larger AD102 silicon for even more shaders, and a wider memory bus; but decided against this because its main competitor, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, is already maxing out the silicon it’s based on, and there’s no threat to the RTX 4090. The RX 7900 XTX can sometimes be had for as low as $900, and this presents a problem for RTX 4080 cards that command roughly $1,200 if not more. It’s harder to get the entire retail channels to slash prices by 20% than simply discontinue the RTX 4080 and launch a new SKU with a lower price, which is what NVIDIA seems to have done.

With the AD103 silicon maxed out, the RTX 4080 SUPER gets a staggering 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs, besides the chip’s full 112 ROPs. The memory sub-system is largely unchanged to the RTX 4080—the on-die L2 cache remains maxed out at 64 MB; and paired with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory across the chip’s full 256-bit memory bus, albeit with a touch faster 23 Gbps memory speed, compared to 22.4 Gbps on the RTX 4080. The GPU frequency is slightly increased to 2550 MHz from 2505 MHz on the RTX 4080; which Gigabyte has further increased to 2595 MHz.

The underlying tech is remains the same. The Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, introduced in 2022, remains contemporary. Its CUDA cores, in addition to generational performance increases, support shader execution reordering, which benefits ray tracing performance. The new 3rd generation RT core supports displaced micro-meshes, a technology that allows game developers to increase geometric complexity of ray traced objects. The new optical flow accelerator component enables DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which allows the GPU to draw entire alternate frames using AI, without involving the graphics pipeline.

Gigabyte is using the largest variant of its WindForce 3X cooling solution for the RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC. This cooler is also featured on the company’s RTX 4090 Gaming OC card. Its 4-slot thick cooler is almost entirely an exposed heatsink, with a thin cooler shroud that holds onto the three fans. There’s minimal RGB in the form of an illuminated logo, and the fan frames. The card provides dual-BIOS, with the default OC BIOS providing the 2595 MHz boost clocks, and the secondary Silent BIOS dialing down to reference clocks, along with a tighter fan curve. A noteworthy aspect of the Gigabyte Gaming OC is that despite its 320 W TGP out of the box, its slider limit goes all the way up to 400 W, something some of the other premium OC cards we’re reviewing today aren’t able to manage. Gigabyte is pricing the RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC at $1,050, a 5% premium over the $1,000 MSRP.