Introduction

Palit GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GamingPro OC is a premium custom design graphics card from Palit, based on the RTX 4080 SUPER, NVIDIA’s new enthusiast segment graphics card that crowns the SUPER series of refresh for the company’s RTX 40 Ada generation of graphics cards. Within Palit’s latest product stack, the GamingPro OC brand is positioned above its JetStream OC, there is no GameRock product based on this GPU, which makes this the most premium RTX 4080 SUPER product from Palit. The RTX 4080 SUPER targets the class of gamers wanting 4K Ultra HD gameplay with maxed out settings, including ray tracing. Each of the three GeForce RTX 40 SUPER SKUs NVIDIA introduced this month has had a different proposition from each other. The RTX 4070 SUPER presented a 21% increase in shaders at the same $600 price point as the RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER increased the memory size and bus width by a third, along with a 10% increase in shaders, at the $800 price. The new RTX 4080 SUPER maxes out the silicon it’s based on, with a 5% increase in shaders over the original RTX 4080, but comes in at a 20% lower starting price.

The idea behind the RTX 4080 SUPER is to help NVIDIA consolidate at the $1,000 price-point given that the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is priced around the $900 mark these days; and given that AMD has no competitor to the RTX 4090. So NVIDIA’s play here is to spruce up the RTX 4080 with more shaders, and give it a more attractive price. The original RTX 4080 launched at $1,200, and it’s very hard to get the retail channel to make such a dramatic price cut, instead of simply discontinuing the RTX 4080 and bringing out a new SKU.

With all 80 SM physically on the AD103 silicon enabled, the RTX 4080 SUPER gets an eye-pleasing 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, and 320 TMUs. It also has all 112 ROPs present on the silicon, as well as the entire 64 MB of L2 cache. The memory sub-system is largely unchanged from the RTX 4080, with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory across the 256-bit memory bus; but the speeds are slightly increased to 23 Gbps, compared to 22.4 Gbps. NVIDIA stuck to 320 W as the total graphics power (TGP), the de facto power limit of the card. Again, the biggest “feature” of the RTX 4080 SUPER remains its 20% lower price than the RTX 4080.

The Ada Lovelace graphics architecture continues to power the RTX 40 SUPER series. The new generation CUDA core, in addition to IPC increases and support for higher clock speeds, 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.

The Palit RTX 4080 SUPER GamingPro OC features the company’s heaviest version of the GamingPro cooling solution that’s also featured on its RTX 4090 GamingPro product. This card comes with a splash of RGB LED lighting and a well designed cooler shroud that maximizes ventilation to the large heatsink underneath. The card also offers a 3-pin ARGB header, so you can sync your rig’s lighting with the card’s. The GamingPro OC offers factory overclocked speeds of 2610 MHz boost, compared to 2550 MHz reference, while leaving the memory untouched at 23 Gbps. We didn’t get a price from Palit, but we expect that the card will sell for $1,050, a small premium over the $1,000 baseline.