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Background
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is a high-end graphics card, designed by Nvidia and produced by multiple board partners, with an initial release on September 1st, 2020. With its release during the 2020-2023 global chip shortage the whole RTX 30 family were in short supply until 2022.
The GeForce RTX 3080 is the 2nd iteration of the RTX family. The graphics card features ray tracing, DirectX 12 Ultimate, PCIe 4.0 x16 and an at-the-time revolutionary "dual axial flow through cooling solution". The card has 10 GB of VRAM, and at a later date available as a 12 GB VRAM variant too. Nvidia boast how the RTX 3080 has a roughly 40% increased ray tracing performance compared to the GeForce RTX 2080, and how their DLSS can triple gaming performance.
The RTX 3080 chip, the GA102, is built on a 628 mm2 Samsung's 8 nm node technology. The chip uses Nvidia's Ampere architecture, which debuted in spring 2020, and comes with the 2nd generation of ray tracing cores, and 3rd generation tensor cores. The smaller N8 technology allows much better efficiency compared to the last generation 12 nm nodes, but instead of optimizing for power, the chip is optimized for performance and draws 100 W more than the RTX 2080.
Identification
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 features multiple graphic card partners and vendors with different specifications and appearances. The GPU model can usually be found on the product sticker, often on the GPU's backside.
To identify your graphics card in Windows, open:
- Nvidia Control Panel
- Select Help in the navigation bar
- The GPU model name will be shown in the items tab.
To identify your graphics card in a Linux environment, see this How-To-Geek's guide.
Troubleshooting
See TechPowerUp's guide for how to teardown and disassemble your RTX 3060 Founders Edition, as well as their high resolution PCB pictures.
Schematics for the GeForce RTX 3080, among others, from multiple board partners can be accessed from this page.
Specifications
The following is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 reference configuration, features, functionality and performance may vary depending on vendor.
Release date: September 1, 2020
Body:
- Type: discrete GPU
- Segment: Desktop
GPU:
- Die size: 628 nm2
- Shading Units: 8960 / 8704
- Raytracing units: 70 / 68
- Tensor Cores: 280 / 272
- Clock (base): 1 440 / 1 260 MHz
- TBP: 350 / 320 W
- PCI Express: 4 x16
Memory:
- Size: 12 / 10 GB
- Type:GDDR6X
- Bandwidth: 912 / 760 GB/s
- Memory Interface Width: 384-bit / 320-bit
I/O:
- No. of Displays: 4
- Type: 1x HDMI, 3x DisplayPort
Technologies:
- 2nd Gen Raytracing
- DirectX 12 Ultimate
- Nvidia G-Sync
Additional Information
Additional sources and Further reading
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