Introduction

ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 Super OC is the company's top of the line custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA's latest enthusiast-segment GPU. The new GeForce RTX 4080 Super crowns the three-part Super branded refresh of the company's RTX 40-series product stack. It is meant for maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD, including with ray tracing; as well as extreme refresh-rate e-sports competitive gameplay. The new GeForce RTX 4080 Super is positioned above the original RTX 4080, which is now being retired from NVIDIA's lineup. As its replacement, you are being offered better performance from a slightly better specs sheet, but more importantly, a 20% reduction in price. While the RTX 4080 launched at $1,200, the RTX 4080 Super launches at a $1,000 baseline. What this means is that premium custom design cards such as the ASUS ROG Strix that we're reviewing today, would be offered at prices comparable to some of the more close-to-baseline custom design RTX 4080 boards from a year ago.



The GeForce RTX 4080 Super is meant to be a slightly spruced up RTX 4080 at a better price. It is based on the same AD103 silicon as the RTX 4080, but while the original stopped short of maxing out all shaders available on the silicon, the new RTX 4080 Super goes the full measure. The AD103 silicon has 80 streaming multiprocessors, all of which are enabled on the RTX 4080 Super, giving it the full counts of 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs; and the chip's full 112 ROPs and 64 MB of L2 cache. This is a roughly 5% increase in shaders and other key components over the RTX 4080. The memory sub-system is largely unchanged—16 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 256-bit memory interface, but the memory speed is slightly increased to 23 Gbps, from the 22.4 Gbps of the RTX 4080. The TGP, or the de facto power limit, is unchanged from 320 W.

The GeForce Super brand of mid-lifecycle refreshes are an exercise in increasing the performance at existing or lower price points, rather than a change in the feature-set. The underlying technology is still the Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, built on the 5 nm EUV foundry node. The new Ada generation CUDA core, besides increases in IPC and clock speed headroom, supports shader execution reordering, which should enhance ray tracing performance; the new 3rd generation RT core supports displaced micro-meshes, a feature that allows game developers to increase the geometric detail of ray traced objects. The optical flow accelerator is a component that allows DLSS 3 Frame Generation to work, drawing entire alternate frames using AI, without involving the main graphics rendering pipeline.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 Super OC retains the iconic cyberpunk design that the company debuted in late-2022 with this generation. It is a vast three-slot cooler with massive fans, a heavy heatsink, and a vapor chamber plate. This card features the largest variant of the current generation ROG Strix cooling solution, which the company uses on its RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 ROG Strix products. This is heavier than the cooler that it uses on the ROG Strix RTX 4070 Ti Super OC. The custom design card is designed to squeeze the most performance out of the RTX 4080 Super out of the box, as well as enabling the highest overclocking headroom possible with air cooling for this GPU. ASUS is asking $1250 for the ROG Strix RTX 4080 Super, a rather hefty premium over the NVIDIA MSRP.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 9x RTX 4080 Super

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.

Architecture

The Ada graphics architecture heralds the third generation of the NVIDIA RTX technology, an effort toward increasing the realism of game visuals by leveraging real-time ray tracing, without the enormous amount of compute power required to draw purely ray-traced 3D graphics. This is done by blending conventional raster graphics with ray traced elements such as reflections, lighting, and global illumination, to name a few. The 3rd generation of RTX introduces the new higher IPC "Ada" CUDA core, 3rd generation RT core, 4th generation Tensor core, and the new Optical Flow Processor, a component that plays a key role in generating new frames without involving the GPU's main graphics rendering pipeline. The GeForce Ada graphics architecture driving the RTX 4080 Super leverages the TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry process to increase transistor counts.



The GeForce RTX 4080 Super is based on the same 5 nm AD103 silicon as the original RTX 4080. As a SKU, it has a lot in common with the RTX 2080 Super, which had maxed out the TU104 silicon, while the original RTX 2080 wasn't too far behind. The AD103 is NVIDIA's second largest silicon, powering not just the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4080 Super, but also the mobile RTX 4090. This 379 mm² beast packs nearly 46 billion transistors—more than that of the previous generation flagship GA102. It has 80 streaming multiprocessors, and since the RTX 4080 Super maxes the chip out, all 80 are enabled. This gives the RTX 4080 Super a phenomenal CUDA core count of 10,240, with 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs, and all of the chip's 112 ROPs. The AD103 features a 256-bit wide memory interface, and the RTX 4080 Super continues to get 16 GB of memory, running at 23 Gbps—higher than the 22.4 Gbps of the RTX 4080.

The AD103 features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface along with support for PCI resizable BAR; and its 256-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface. The GigaThread Engine serves as the main workflow controller for the GPU, dispatching work among the GPU's 7 graphics processing clusters (GPCs). Each GPC shares a Raster Engine and render backends among six texture processing clusters (TPCs), the indivisible subunit of the GPU; one of the GPCs has just four TPCs. Each TPC has two Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), and a Polymorph unit. Each SM contains 128 CUDA cores across four partitions. Half of these CUDA cores are pure-FP32; while the other half is capable of FP32 or INT32. The SM retains concurrent FP32+INT32 math processing capability. The SM also contains a 3rd generation RT core, four 4th generation Tensor cores, some cache memory, and four TMUs. One of the seven GPCs on the AD103 physically only has four TPCs.

With 80 SM that have 128 CUDA cores, each; we arrive at 10,240 CUDA cores. NVIDIA says that the RTX 4080 Super maxes out the AD103 silicon; and this statement is 99.999% true. The AD103 has four NVDEC and two NVENC units on the silicon; but for the RTX 4080 Super, just like the RTX 4080, three of these NVDEC units are disabled. This is irrelevant for a GeForce RTX product, and NVIDIA only put those large numbers of NVDEC units for pro-visualization graphics cards, such as the RTX 5000 Ada.

3rd Gen RT Core and Ray Tracing

The 3rd generation RT core accelerates the most math-intensive aspects of real-time ray tracing, including BVH traversal. Displaced micro-mesh engine is a revolutionary feature introduced with the new 3rd generation RT core. Just as mesh shaders and tessellation have had a profound impact on improving performance with complex raster geometry, allowing game developers to significantly increase geometric complexity; DMMs is a method to reduce the complexity of the bounding-volume hierarchy (BVH) data-structure, which is used to determine where a ray hits geometry. Previously, the BVH had to capture even the smallest details to properly determine the intersection point. Ada's ray tracing architecture also receives a major performance uplift from Shader Execution Reordering (SER), a software-defined feature that requires awareness from game-engines, to help the GPU reorganize and optimize worker threads associated with ray tracing.


The BVH now needn't have data for every single triangle on an object, but can represent objects with complex geometry as a coarse mesh of base triangles, which greatly simplifies the BVH data structure. A simpler BVH means less memory consumed and helps to greatly reduce ray tracing CPU load, because the CPU only has to generate a smaller structure. With older "Ampere" and "Turing" RT cores, each triangle on an object had to be sampled at high overhead, so the RT core could precisely calculate ray intersection for each triangle. With Ada, the simpler BVH, plus the displacement maps can be sent to the RT core, which is now able to figure out the exact hit point on its own. NVIDIA has seen 11:1 to 28:1 compression in total triangle counts. This reduces BVH compile times by 7.6x to over 15x, in comparison to the older RT core; and reducing its storage footprint by anywhere between 6.5 to 20 times. DMMs could reduce disk- and memory bandwidth utilization, utilization of the PCIe bus, as well as reduce CPU utilization. NVIDIA worked with Simplygon and Adobe to add DMM support for their tool chains.

Opacity Micro Meshes

Opacity Micro Meshes (OMM) is a new feature introduced with Ada to improve rasterization performance, particularly with objects that have alpha (transparency data). Most low-priority objects in a 3D scene, such as leaves on a tree, are essentially rectangles with textures on the leaves where the transparency (alpha) creates the shape of the leaf. RT cores have a hard time intersecting rays with such objects, because they're not really in the shape that they appear (they're really just rectangles with textures that give you the illusion of shape). Previous-generation RT cores had to have multiple interactions with the rendering stage to figure out the shape of a transparent object, because they couldn't test for alpha by themselves.


This has been solved by using OMMs. Just as DMMs simplify geometry by creating meshes of micro-triangles; OMMs create meshes of rectangular textures that align with parts of the texture that aren't alpha, so the RT core has a better understanding of the geometry of the object, and can correctly calculate ray intersections. This has a significant performance impact on shading performance in non-RT applications, too. Practical applications of OMMs aren't just low-priority objects such as vegetation, but also smoke-sprites and localized fog. Traditionally there was a lot of overdraw for such effects, because they layered multiple textures on top of each other, that all had to be fully processed by the shaders. Now only the non-opaque pixels get executed—OMMs provide a 30 percent speedup with graphics buffer fill-rates, and a 10 percent impact on frame-rates.

DLSS 3 Frame Generation

DLSS 3 introduces a revolutionary new feature that promises a doubling in frame-rate at comparable quality, it's called AI frame-generation. Building on DLSS 2 and its AI super-resolution (scaling up a lower-resolution frame to native resolution with minimal quality loss); DLSS 3 can generate entire frames simply using AI, without involving the graphics rendering pipeline, it's also possible to enable frame generation at native resolution without upscaling. Later in the article, we will show you DLSS 3 in action.


Every alternating frame with DLSS 3 is hence AI-generated, without being a replica of the previous rendered frame. This is possible only on the Ada graphics architecture, because of a hardware component called the optical flow accelerator (OFA), which assists in predicting what the next frame could look like, by creating what NVIDIA calls an optical flow-field. OFA ensures that the DLSS 3 algorithm isn't confused by static objects in a rapidly-changing 3D scene (such as a race sim). The process heavily relies on the performance uplift introduced by the FP8 math format of the 4th generation Tensor core. A third key ingredient of DLSS 3 is Reflex. By reducing the rendering queue to zero, Reflex plays a vital role in ensuring that latency with DLSS 3 enabled is at an acceptable level. A combination of OFA and the 4th Gen Tensor core is why the Ada architecture is required to use DLSS 3, and why it won't work on older architectures.

Packaging

The Card

The ASUS Strix cooler is massive. Thanks to a refreshed design language and more vibrant color theme compared to ASUS's GeForce 30 series, the card will definitely turn some heads. The color theme consists of a matte black base, with some red and blue highlights and two RGB diffusers, one at the tail end, another for the ROG Strix logo on top. The main cooler shroud and the backplate are both metal.


Dimensions of the card are 35.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2379 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 70 mm.

(pic soon)
Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and two HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere and same as non-Super Ada).

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada Lovelace architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


All GeForce RTX 4080 and 4080 Super graphics cards use the 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, an adapter cable is included in the box.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle from the default performance BIOS to the quiet BIOS which runs a more relaxed fan curve at reference clocks.


Near the back of the card you'll find two fan headers that run the connected fans at the same speed as the GPU fans, including fan stop. This makes for a great option to control the case fans according to graphics card temperature.