Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC Review: Big, Custom Ampere

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards featured in this article on an ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i9-10980XE 18-core / 36-thread processor and 32GB of HyperX DDR4 RAM clocked at 2,933MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, games, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System Intel Core i9 Powered

Hardware Used: Intel Core i9-10980XE (3GHz - 4.4GHz, 18-Core) ASUS X299 Prime (Intel X299 Chipset) 32GB Corsair DDR4-2933 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio Integrated Network Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE NVIDIA Titan RTX NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

Relevant Software: Windows 10 Pro x64 (v2004) AMD Radeon Software v20.8.3 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v456.16 Benchmarks Used: IndigoBench v4 LuxMark v4_alpha0 SiSoft SANDRA 2020 VRMark 3DMark (Time Spy, Fire Strike, Port Royal) Unigine Superposition Crytek Neon Noir Metro Exodus Red Dead Redemption 2 Gears Tactics Wolfenstein: Youngblood FarCry: New Dawn

Unigine Superposition Pseudo-DirectX / OpenGL Gaming

Superposition is a handy benchmark tool from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in as well. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in two modes using the DirectX code path – 1080p Extreme and VR Future -- to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition

Although it technically has a higher, peak boost clock, the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC came in just a notch behind the NVIDIA Founder's Edition in Unigine Superposition's 1080P Extreme test. Both RTX 3080's, however, blew past all of the other cards to finish at the top of the charts.
 

Superposition's VR Future test followed a similar performance trend, with the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC finishing just a notch behind NVIDIA's Founder's Edition card, but well out in front of everything else we tested.

UL VRMark Testing Rift And Vive Readiness

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


In VR Mark, the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC once again just missed the mark set by the GeForce RTX 3080 Founder's Edition. The delta separating the cards is tiny though, and would be imperceptible in real-world use.

UL 3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 Performance

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC behaved curiously in the DX12-based 3DMark Tme Spy benchmark. No matter how many times we re-ran this test, the card always finished a few percentage points behind the NVIDIA Founder's Edition. It was still very fast -- faster than an Titan RTX, as you can see -- but the delta here was larger than what we saw in the previous couple of tests. We suspect this particular workload was causing lower then expected sustained clocks than the Founder's Edition card but haven't capture that data to analyze just yet.

UL 3DMark Fire Strike Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

Our results in the DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark once again have the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC and NVIDIA Founder's Edition card finishing right on top of each other, well ahead of all of the other cards we tested.

UL 3DMark Port Royal DXR Ray Tracing Benchmark

Port Royal was released earlier this year as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable DXR, and NVIDIA is the only company to have done so at this point, hence the lack of Radeons in the chart.


The same held true in the Port Royal test. The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GamingPro OC couldn't quite catch the FE, but it left everything else in its wake.