Introduction

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is the company’s premium RTX 3080 Ampere product, targeted at 4K UHD high-end gaming PC builds with the right balance of bling and practicality. This is one of the few custom-design cards we have with us in this review that sticks to the standard full height. The Gaming Pro OC board design involves a chunky triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution with copious amounts of metal and minimal use of RGB bling. Its designers also made clever use of its length to ensure one of the three fans vents completely through the card, which is not unlike NVIDIA’s Founders Edition card with its Dual Axial Flow-Through cooler.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ampere is NVIDIA’s new-generation flagship consumer graphics card, designed to bring 4K UHD gaming with raytracing turned on to a three-figure price-point. It also offers 1440p and 1080p high refresh-rate gameplay with RTX on. The new Ampere graphics architecture represents the 2nd generation NVIDIA RTX, the company’s bold new effort to bring real-time raytracing to the consumer segment by combining conventional raster 3D graphics with raytraced components, such as lighting, shadow, reflections, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. This results in visuals that go above and beyond what raster graphics are capable of, while being true to life.

NVIDIA’s 2nd generation RTX introduced with Ampere consists of a new double-throughput CUDA core design that performs concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations; the new 2nd generation RT core that handles the bulk of the BVH traversal and intersection workloads of RTX, which now comes with fixed function temporal hardware that makes even more RTX effects possible, including raytraced motion blur. The new 3rd generation tensor core shares many similarities with the tensor cores at the heart of the A100 Tensor Core processor, leveraging the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to accelerate AI inference performance by an order of magnitude.

NVIDIA has doubled the SIMD horsepower of the RTX 3080 over its predecessor, the RTX 2080, with a staggering 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, 272 tensor cores, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. To keep all this compute muscle fed, NVIDIA has also significantly upgraded the memory—10 GB of new GDDR6X memory ticking at 19 Gbps, over a 320-bit wide memory interface, working out to 760 GB/s of bandwidth, a 70% increase over the previous generation. The new “GA102” silicon at the heart of the RTX 3080 is built on a new 8 nm silicon fabrication process Samsung designed specially for NVIDIA. The card also takes advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 x16, ready for new-generation desktop platforms.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC builds on NVIDIA’s accomplished Founders Edition design by combining a premium PCB with a capable-looking cooling solution that uses a pair of large aluminium fin stacks ventilated by a pair of fans. The card is longer than the PCB itself, so nearly a third of the card’s airflow goes through, venting upwards, just like with the Founders Edition cooler. The card ships with a mild factory overclock of 1740 MHz GPU Boost (compared to 1710 MHz reference), while the memory is left untouched. Palit hasn’t revealed its pricing to us yet. We are assuming that it will be $710, a $10 premium.