Early testing: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is 70-80% faster without RTX

Eurogamer reporter Richard Leadbetter had the opportunity to play with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 video card. NVIDIA gave him permission to publish some performance results, albeit from a select set of games and with some specific requirements.

In his article (and video), the RTX 3080 to the RTX 2080 in Doom Eternal, Control, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5, Borderlands 3 and Quake 2 RTX. All tests were performed at 4K with max settings and it seems Ampere indeed delivers a stunning performance uplift versus the Turing generation.

It's just a small selection of games of course, but results of 70 to over 80 percent higher performance are very promising. Similarly, ray tracing performance is a lot higher with Quake 2 RTX posting a 92.3 percent gain in performance.

Previously if you wanted to play Control with the full RT feature set at 4K60, you'd need an RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 3080 slashes the cost of that experience and allows you to use the equivalent of DLSS balanced mode for 4K60 with a boost to image quality. Meanwhile, Metro Exodus with DLSS now runs at 4K60 on ultra settings with ultra RT, with DLSS active - I just hope to see that title updated with the latest DLSS tech.