Is the 3080 still good in 2023 ?

[Nicholas Rodriguez]

Definitely a stupid question ask but I'm curious to hear peoples thoughts about this question? 

[filpo]

depends whats the price. if its about 450 or 500 us then maybe ye. Its decent. But at like 600 or 550 I would say no. 

[bezza...]

Just now, filpo said:

depends whats the price. if its about 450 or 500 us then maybe ye. Its decent. But at like 600 or 550 I would say no. 

even for that prise the lack of vram is a rlly big bottlneck. i would go for a rx 6800 or 6900xt instead

[johnno23]

A YES from me. Using a 3080 with only the 10GB and not a ti but it rocks on my LG nano ips 34" 144hz. Any games I play as metro exodus red dead 2 cyberpunk all look glorious. No need for me to even consider an upgrade to 40 series. As the only 40 series worth the money is beyond my budget. anything less than the 4090 is simply BS. high cost and much lower performance metrics.

PS I have zero experience with AMD GPUs the last 12 years or so. I refer merely to nvidea offerings.

[porina]

In terms of how good it is today, it's still a lot of GPU that'll handle most things you throw at it with ease. I don't view the vram quantity to be a big problem for now, as there's only a few edge cases it might crop up in, but it may get more frequent as time goes on and backing off the settings a little may be required to maintain high performance. 

 

If buying new then a 4070 is a better buy, unless 3080 pricing has dropped as they cost more than a 4070 here now.

 

If buying used it gets a lot more complicated. Price, condition, any warranty (if buying from a store for example).

[Agall]

16 minutes ago, Nicholas Rodriguez said:

Definitely a stupid question ask but I'm curious to hear peoples thoughts about this question? 

In most games yes, but in 2023, its going to run at a lot of problems with AAA titles that make it not worth the compromise.

 

Even in 2020, the compromise was between DLSS+RT performance vs more VRAM. In 2023, FSR exists and is quite good, which negates the DLSS advantage and the RTX 3080's RT performance is lacking for the 1440p that people would've purchased it for. 

 

Buying it on launch at MSRP in 2020 is still a good value 2.5 years later, but buying it in 2023 isn't. Maybe at the $450 I see for ebay prices, but that's on par with a new RX 6800.

[Budget DIY]

OP is requesting thoughts, and here is mine: it never was a good option. High-end cards tend to gobble up all the power, just so your eyeballs can get flooded with some fancy photons. Smooth and good enough quality to distinguish things @ low-ish power == perfection IMO. I wouldn't want to have such a card in my system, not even if I got it for free.

[tkitch]

39 minutes ago, porina said:

In terms of how good it is today, it's still a lot of GPU that'll handle most things you throw at it with ease. I don't view the vram quantity to be a big problem for now, as there's only a few edge cases it might crop up in, but it may get more frequent as time goes on and backing off the settings a little may be required to maintain high performance. 

 

If buying new then a 4070 is a better buy, unless 3080 pricing has dropped as they cost more than a 4070 here now.

 

If buying used it gets a lot more complicated. Price, condition, any warranty (if buying from a store for example).

It crops up more when you're doing stuff above 1080.  Which on a 3080 (or higher) tier GPU you should be.

So 10GB is a bit light for that tier card.

[PDifolco]

23 minutes ago, Budget DIY said:

OP is requesting thoughts, and here is mine: it never was a good option. High-end cards tend to gobble up all the power, just so your eyeballs can get flooded with some fancy photons. Smooth and good enough quality to distinguish things @ low-ish power == perfection IMO. I wouldn't want to have such a card in my system, not even if I got it for free.

With this reasoning you should travel by bike instead of plane at all times lol!

You can undervolt and limit power draw of a 3080 to around 250W and have a pretty efficient card

To me the real big limitation if the card is the insufficient 10GB or 12GB VRAM, that's why I upgraded to a 24GB 7900XTX

 

[Budget DIY]

10 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

With this reasoning you should travel by bike instead of plane at all times lol!

Gues what...

10 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

You can undervolt and limit power draw of a 3080 to around 250W and have a pretty efficient card

Idle power can be lowered only so far. And you could be doing the same thing already, on a lower end card. Can't get those "gains", high end cards just consume more energy.

[porina]

5 minutes ago, tkitch said:

It crops up more when you're doing stuff above 1080.  Which on a 3080 (or higher) tier GPU you should be.

So 10GB is a bit light for that tier card.

For now we only have a handful of titles known to have problems at higher settings and 8GB. I don't know how many of those would still be a problem at 10GB. If it happens just turn down the settings a bit. 

 

It would certainly be nice to have the rumoured 20GB model that was floating around even before it was launched, but it is what it is.

[tkitch]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

For now we only have a handful of titles known to have problems at higher settings and 8GB. I don't know how many of those would still be a problem at 10GB. If it happens just turn down the settings a bit. 

 

It would certainly be nice to have the rumoured 20GB model that was floating around even before it was launched, but it is what it is.

and as I mentioned, those tests were at 1080 ultra.  Not even 1440 or 4K.  Which would make it worse.

[johnno23]

Myself I went from the  GT 240 to a 780 then 560ti later to the 1080ti and that was replaced by my present 3080. Each step of the way I have played all the games i wanted to play with ease over the years. Chasing the latest and greatest is basically a fools game unless you have money to burn Each card I purchased was well into its release cycle so had time to consider peoples views.

Myself I think I got lucky with the silicon lottery as my 3080 is undervolted and scores with no xmp or AMD style OC for memory. the cpu is running stock and I can hit just shy of 23,000 in Cinebench no problem. I did tune the CPU and scored 24 700 but dialled it back as it made absolutely zero impact on my games..

The OP never asked about price merely thoughts on the 3080 today compared to what it can do....I firmly believe the 3080 is as capable today as it was on release,

the biggest issue I find with people around me that I know personally is that 95% of them have no idea at all how to use the settings for the games they play. they simply select ultra and then complain. 

If you dive into the settings and make some sensible adjustments they never see the graphical changes but are wondering why it suddenly looks and plays so well without glitches and stutters etc.

 

[Nicholas Rodriguez]

Thank you everyone for all of your thoughts about this GPU. It's probably worth waiting until the 50 series comes out within time if you already own this GPU. 

[porina]

9 minutes ago, tkitch said:

and as I mentioned, those tests were at 1080 ultra.  Not even 1440 or 4K.  Which would make it worse.

I've lost track a bit of which recent high profile game had which problems. Raster gaming 1440p is still generally fine at high, with possibly some games like TLOU and Forspoken requiring dropping to medium at 8GB. 4k (upscaling if need) isn't much a stretch. RT might need more careful balancing of settings but that is still an area that is generally lacking, more so on AMD side than nvidia.

 

7 minutes ago, johnno23 said:

If you dive into the settings and make some sensible adjustments they never see the graphical changes but are wondering why it suddenly looks and plays so well without glitches and stutters etc.

Stutter in modern titles is not something you can hardware or setting your way out of in the more broken recent releases. It requires game code changes to truly fix.

[Sol_NB]

I still don’t know how overblown the 8GB VRAM problem really is going forward. Like we saw handful of games struggle, but could you just lower settings to get those to run ok anyways? 

[PDifolco]

47 minutes ago, Sol_NB said:

I still don’t know how overblown the 8GB VRAM problem really is going forward. Like we saw handful of games struggle, but could you just lower settings to get those to run ok anyways? 

Seems a real issue to me (and to HUB guys as well ), on one side games have larger and larger textures, and on the other many people get resolution increases to 1440p or 4k

All of this needs VRAM for a good gameplay experience, there's no other solution ...

 

[johnno23]

possibly the term stutter was incorrect terminology but on my 1080 ti playing Horizon zero dawn which did have a pretty rough start with the initial PC release the game would run smooth then appear to skip a couple of frames so to speak...as if on an old VHS someone had hit the pause button and then Play immediately afterwards....this went away when I lowered my settings and assumed I was just pushing the card to hard ? however when the game was finally updated i was able to increase the settings again without it happening.

 

[Sol_NB]

45 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Seems a real issue to me (and to HUB guys as well ), on one side games have larger and larger textures, and on the other many people get resolution increases to 1440p or 4k

All of this needs VRAM for a good gameplay experience, there's no other solution ...

 

Yeah if you’re doing 4K sure. But 1440p? I don’t know. If you keep things to medium or high how would you not be fine at 8gb? I’m just waiting to see if it becomes a giant nothing burger for 1440p if you don’t use max settings 

[johnno23]

I run all my games as Metro exodus cyberpunk Dishonoured 2 Horizon Zero dawn Deus Ex mankind divided and Control etc at high settings on a 3440 1440p 34" nano ips at 144hz. frame rates are rock steady and the games look great on an MSI 3080 10GB LHR.

RTX DLSS etc I dont mess around with too much and leave as a default at balanced 90% of the time.

Other games that are less demanding I simply run on Ultra......eve online Everspace 2 The forest warframe and tons of others.

I suppose going to 4K i would suffer but i am more than happy with what I see visually on my screen when playing games.

Eye candy enough and smooth gameplay so unless people really want to push the PC to its limits and get the highest resolutions possible then a 3080 will not suffice. Not many cards will but for most people a 3080 is perfectly fine in 2023 for 99% of the games available. I also read that the unreal 5 engine is undergoing some major improvements to allow better lighting and graphical quality with less demand on the GPUs so as far as I can see i should be fine for at least another couple of years.

 

[PDifolco]

34 minutes ago, Sol_NB said:

Yeah if you’re doing 4K sure. But 1440p? I don’t know. If you keep things to medium or high how would you not be fine at 8gb? I’m just waiting to see if it becomes a giant nothing burger for 1440p if you don’t use max settings 

In my experience at ultrawide 1440p some games need more than 8GB VRAM already on high settings (and 11+ on ultra..)

[PDifolco]

2 hours ago, Budget DIY said:

Gues what...

Idle power can be lowered only so far. And you could be doing the same thing already, on a lower end card. Can't get those "gains", high end cards just consume more energy.

Hope you never need to travel 1000km

Anyway, lower end card, or better no card at all, will always consume less, but that's not the point here

[xg32]

if you are buying a card then the 6900 or 6950xt is probably a better deal, after the recent games, 16gb vram for a new card is almost a requirement (i can easily induce vram related crashes on my 3080ti on RE4, 2077 and spiderman, i dont have TLOU or jedi survivor to test)

 

The best deal i've seen recently was the 6950xt for 530usd on newegg, which is in practice 10-15% faster than a 3080ti, so unless you can find a 3080 for under 500usd... i dont know if it's a good deal.

[Sol_NB]

4 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

In my experience at ultrawide 1440p some games need more than 8GB VRAM already on high settings (and 11+ on ultra..)

How many though? And are they the recent very badly optimized barely working ones? Because I don’t know if that’s a good test bed 

[Budget DIY]

1 minute ago, PDifolco said:

Hope you never need to travel 1000km

Anyway, lower end card, or better no card at all, will always consume less, but that's not the point here

Yes, it is. Re-read OP's topic. They requested thoughts on a particular component. They got mine.

Also, there is zero need for me to travel even more then 50 km from my home.