With most of our focus in the past month being on next-gen console launches and their latest game releases, we thought it was time to take a peek into the looking glass and see what the land of PC has to offer. Gigabyte reached out to us asking if we would like to take a look at the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC and provided us with a loan test bench to take full advantage of the card.
Here are the system specifications we used for our benchmarks.
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC Test Build
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X (Wraith Prism Cooler)
- Motherboard: B550 Aorus Elite
- Graphics Card: Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC
- Memory: 16GB Aorus RGB DDR4 3600MHz
- Storage: Crucial 250GB SATA SSD
- Power Supply: Cooler Master V850 GOLD Modular
- Operating System: Windows 10 Pro
Here’s a brief rundown of what powers the RTX 3080 Vision OC, and how it stacks up to the new consoles, at least on paper.
| RTX 3080 Vision OC | PlayStation 5 | Xbox Series X | |
| CUDA Cores / Unified Shaders | 8704 | 2304 (36 CU) | 3328 (52 CU) |
| Core Clock | 1800 MHz | 2233 MHz | 1825 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 19000 MHz | 14000 MHz | 14000 MHz |
| Memory Size | 10 GB | 16 GB (Shared) | 10 GB (Reserved) |
| Memory Type | GDDR6X | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus | 320 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 760 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 560 GB/s |
| Processing Power | 29.7 teraflops | 10.28 teraflops | 12 teraflops |
| Recommended PSU | 750W | Integrated | Integrated |
Glancing at the specs above it’s clear that the new consoles are no match for NVIDIA’s high-end desktop offerings, but we all know that with optimisations, consoles are generally able to keep up in terms of visuals for a decent time-frame after their initial launch.
With the technical specs out of the way, how does it perform in PC Gaming? We tested out some modern titles in both 1440p and 4K resolution, the target resolution for next-gen gaming, and received the following results.
| HIGHEST PRESETS | 1440p (Average) | 4K (Average) |
| Grant Theft Auto V | 132fps | 100fps |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 84fps | 60fps |
| Control (w DLSS 2.0) RTX on | 110fps | 64fps |
Looking at the test results it’s really great to see that even at 4K Resolution the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC smashes past 60 frames per second in 4K with the highest detail. Ray-tracing in Control looked absolutely stunning, and even though the framerate is mostly only achieved due to Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0 sorcery, we’re seriously blown away by the visuals. Let’s hope that with the new consoles now supporting ray-tracing that we’re going to see more titles with it implemented in the years to come.
While some people have raised concerns about the VRAM of the RTX 3080 being lower than the RTX 2080 Ti, it never posed as a bottleneck in any of our testing. It’s possible that in future titles with high-resolution textures that it could become an issue, but we think it’s unlikely due to the next-gen consoles targeting similar resolutions and with similar VRAM capacity.
Moving on to synthetic benchmarks, we got quite impressive results, reaching a respectable 14409 Points in 3DMark Time Spy, 7129 in Time Spy Extreme and 11806 Points in Port Royal.
To conclude, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC is a beast of a graphics card, and while overclocking isn’t on our résumé, we think that experienced enthusiasts will be able to squeeze even more juice out of it (while we don’t really think it’s needed). Regardless of what game or resolution you’re looking to play the 3080 is able to achieve playable framerates with high detail. The unfortunate truth is that due to Covid, limited supply and a weak economy in South Africa, the RTX 3080 has two major issues; Supply and Price. If you’re lucky enough to find one, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Vision OC can be picked up for around R21 999 at select online resellers such as Wootware, Rebel Gaming or Titan-Ice.
