Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Will Judd

Updated on 3 Jun 2021

On this page, we've selected two Ubi titles, Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, plus Death Stranding and Hitman 2. There's an even split between DX11 and DX12 APIs here, with Ubisoft on the older version and the others on the latest DirectX.

As we mentioned on the first page, we're using our 2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a ultra premium Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal at DDR4-3600 CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by a hefty 1000W Corsair RM1000i PSU.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding is a game that makes reviewing graphics cards somewhat challenging. As the benchmarks demonstrate, the Decima Engine clearly favours AMD hardware - yet even so, the 3080 Ti manages to claim a (margin-of-error) victory over the RX 6900 XT, its closest Team Red competitor, even without factoring in one of the best DLSS implementations we've seen. The 3080 Ti is also still close behind the 3090, with Nvidia's elder statesmen holding just a three percent advantage. Compared to the RTX 3080, the Ti is around nine percent faster at 4K, closing to five percent at 1440p.

Death Stranding: Max, DX12, TAA

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 sees the trend continue, with the 3080 Ti tying the 6900 XT at 4K and sitting just one percent behind the RTX 3090 - though you will note that both AMD and Nvidia cards outperform their opposite-team counterparts in different parts of the benchmark, if you consult the frame-time data. There's a 12 percent advantage for the RTX 3080 Ti over the 3080, which is on the higher end of the margins we've seen thus far. At lower resolutions, the single-core nature of the Far Cry 5 game becomes more evident and differences dry up, with Nvidia cards tending to do better thanks, possibly, to their reduced DX11 driver overhead.

Far Cry 5: Ultra, DX11, TAA

Hitman 2

Similar to Far Cry 5, Hitman 2 is very much limited by CPU performance at lower resolutions to the point where you really need to be pushing the GPU hard with 4K resolution to really put graphics to the fore in this one. To that end, while we have the 1080p and 1440p data available, you'll see that in our selected cards, there's no real difference and only by moving up to 4K do we start to see graphics hardware put through its paces in Io Interactive's impressive Glacier engine. At that point, the differences start to appear and the data suggests that overall, the 3080 Ti beats 6900 XT by almost six per cent - and it's pretty much a match for the full-fat RTX 3090.

Hitman 2: Ultra, DX12, TAA

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a title that is notoriously difficult on both CPU and GPU, and often fails to deliver the kind of performance gains we would expect when moving from one class of hardware to the next. The benchmark also includes variable weather, with ultra high volumetric clouds able to significantly impact the result of any given benchmark run. Lowest one per cent scores should be ignored on this one, as even at 4K with a powerful CPU, weird spikes occur. To normalise the results as much as possible, we run and re-run the benchmark until the skies are clear.

Even at 4K, there's little to separate Nvidia's three fastest consumer cards. The 3080 Ti is five percent faster than the 3080, while the 3090 is another four percent faster than that. The 3090 and RX 6900 XT are near identical in performance terms here, so that means AMD win their matchup by a small margin once again.