Launched Today - NVIDIA's New GeForce RTX 4080!

MicroCenterOfficial · November 2022

Written by Sean Mekinda

Last month, NVIDIA kicked off their 40 series of graphics cards with the GeForce RTX 4090, a top-of-the-line GPU designed with high-end enthusiast builds in mind. Today the GeForce RTX 4080 arrives, a small step down that continues to make use of all the fantastic advancements the 40 Series introduced, like DLSS 3 and upgraded ray tracing, making it the perfect card for anyone looking to bump up their system without going over budget!

What's new with GeForce RTX 4080?

Hardware:

The GeForce RTX 4080 continues to work on NVIDIA's new Ada Lovelace Architecture, with a promised 2x better performance and power efficiency, making the RTX 4080 comparable to last generation's upgraded RTX 3080, the RTX 3080 Ti. Featuring new 40 Series multiprocessors, Fourth-Gen Tensor Cores, and Third-Gen RT Cores, this is a card that'll pack a wallop whether you're cruising Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 or working on rendering your next great YouTube video. It comes ready to work with all the NVIDIA programs that make the 40 Series such a tour-de-force, like NVIDIA Studio, Reflex, GSync, and, of course, DLSS 3.

DLSS 3:

DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is something certainly familiar to anyone who has used an NVIDIA card in the past generation or two, helping to bump up quality and frame rates in a wide variety of games. It works through AI, examining lower-resolution frames and upscaling them to 1440p and beyond without putting the stress of actually rendering 1440p frames on your GPU. In other words, you'll get better resolution without stressing your GPU, allowing you to really push the GeForce RTX 4080 to its limit and eke out as much power as possible - like running 4K Cyberpunk at 85 FPS!

Ray Tracing:

Ray tracing has been NVIDIA's big push the past few generations and isn't something that you'd immediately notice, at least until it's not there. It takes the lighting of a video game world and elevates it to that of real life, allowing beams of light to pass between tree leaves and accurately reflect off signs and puddles. When it's on, it feels natural and helps bring games that much closer to reality. NVIDIA's third generation of RT Cores helps to elevate ray tracing yet again, with a new Opacity Micromap Engine and a new Displaced Micro-Mesh Engine, allowing for more complex locations, like fences and foliage, to be ray traced faster than ever before, so your immersion won't be broken when you wonder why the sunlight isn't dancing through the tree leaves like in real life.