PC Games Benchmarks
Nvidia’s RTX 30-series takes aim at one of the main criticisms of its first ray-tracing GPUs: raw performance. While the RTX 20-series was an impressive leap forward in terms of features, it didn’t always provide a significant bump up in performance on standard rasterised workloads, especially when taking their exorbitant prices into consideration. Not only does the RTX 3080 deliver a better overall experience for anyone still stuck on a GTX 10-series card, but there’s also enough of a gain in ray-tracing titles that makes a compelling argument for a gen-on-gen upgrade.
The RTX 3080 we have here is the ASUS Strix RTX 3080, given that Nvidia’s fancy Founder’s Edition GPUs aren’t available for purchase in South Africa. ASUS has been producing some of the best third-party GPUs for numerous generations now, with their Strix branding really kicking off with the GTX 970 and 980. A lot has changed since then with regards to cooler design and overall branding, but the main talking points of the Strix design language have thankfully remained in this RTX 3080.
What that means is that the monstrously big three fan cooler stays alarmingly silent even under heavy loads, while being inaudible when idle. The three fans–two spinning clockwise and the center fan anti-clockwise–move a lot of air through the massive finned heatsink attached to the redesigned board for the RTX 3080. It’s not a revolution like you’ll find on the Founder’s Edition cards with their push and pull configuration, but ASUS shows here that the traditional approach still has a lot going for it.