The RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070 launch was neat, but it lacked one important thing: Actual benchmarks with actual frame rate figures.
In the first look at a live benchmark — not a verified one, but at least live gameplay — Nvidia have released a comparison video of DOOM Eternal gameplay at 4K. Running at max settings, the video has side-by-side comparisons with an RTX 2080 Ti, showing the difference in performance between the two cards.
DOOM Eternal doesn’t have any ray-tracing, so there’s no comparison of those features. And DOOM Eternal is also one of the most well-optimised games around, helped by id’s expertise with the Vulkan renderer.
The video doesn’t offer a side-by-side gameplay comparison for the entirety of the shot, and some large battle scenes are only shown running off the RTX 3080. Still, it’s enough to give a comparison of what to expect. In one comparison shot, there’s about a 40 to 50fps difference between the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3080 — although it’s a cut-scene and not indicative of the game’s most intensive sequences.
Another cut-scene before a big fight shows a much smaller game of around 20-30 fps. The RTX 3080 drops to closer to 100fps, but for the most part it hovers around 120-140fps.
The pitch for the RTX 3080 is that it’s a card for high-refresh rate 4K gaming, whereas the RTX 2080 Ti was sold as the world’s first 4K/60fps GPU. I wouldn’t take DOOM Eternal as proof that the RTX 3080 is truly capable of all of that just yet, because DOOM Eternal is an outlier in just how well optimised it is.
But it does answer at least one question: How fast is the RTX 3080 — and potentially the RTX 3070 and 3090 — in games where ray-tracing isn’t a factor? It’s certainly faster, and the price differential is a huge factor. In Australia, the RTX 3080 is coming in cheaper than what the RTX 2080 did, and you’re getting a sizeable performance bump from what the RTX 2080 Ti could achieve.
That alone — especially if you think around 1440p gaming — is a strong pitch for Nvidia to make. Of course, it’s still early days. Reviews of the first Nvidia cards are expected over the coming weeks. And as soon as I’ve been able to run some tests of my own, I’ll let you know how it fares.
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