BenchPair

GeForce RTX 3080 bottleneck & FPS

Ranked 26 of 126 desktop graphics cards in our database (79th percentile). Paired with a Core i9-10910 it lands near 108 fps at 1080p and 16 fps at 4K in a typical AAA title at high settings.

SpecificationsAmpere · 2020
ArchitectureAmpere
Shading units8,704
Boost clock1,710 MHz
Memory10 GB
Memory bandwidth760.3 GB/s
Board power320 W
Released2020
Frame rate by resolutionwith Core i9-10910, high
ResolutionEst. FPSGPU loadLimited by
1920 x 1080 108 99% Balanced
2560 x 1440 64 99% Graphics card
3440 x 1440 49 99% Graphics card
3840 x 2160 16 98% Graphics card
Best matched processors1080p, high

Ranked by how little performance the pairing wastes, not by which processor is fastest. The fastest chip pairs well with everything, which makes it a useless recommendation.

ProcessorEst. FPSUnused
Core i9-10910 108 0.2%
Core i5-12400 108 0.8%
Core i5-12400F 108 0.8%
Core i7-10700K 108 0.8%
Core i7-10700KF 108 0.8%
Ryzen 9 3900 108 1.6%
Estimated FPS by game1440p, high, Core i9-10910
GameEst. FPSVRAM
Cyberpunk 2077 35 11.5 GB needed
Fortnite 89 OK
Counter-Strike 2 157 OK
Baldur's Gate 3 64 OK
Red Dead Redemption 2 49 OK
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 47 10.8 GB needed

Who a GeForce RTX 3080 is actually for

This sits in the range where most enthusiast builds land, and it is the range where pairing matters most. Fast enough that a budget processor will hold it back at 1080p; not so fast that it stops caring about resolution. Get the pairing right and very little is wasted.

The sweet spot is 1440p. At that resolution the card is doing enough work to stay busy without the processor needing to be exceptional.

Is 10 GB enough?

10 GB is adequate for most of what we model, but falls short in 4 of 16 titles at 1440p and high settings. Running out of video memory does not degrade gracefully — frame times spike rather than the average simply dropping, so it feels considerably worse than a small average loss would suggest. Dropping texture quality one step almost always recovers it.

A note on age

Released in 2020, this card is 6 years old. Beyond raw speed, older hardware misses features newer engines increasingly assume — mesh shaders, hardware ray tracing, and the newest upscalers. A modern title may run worse than these numbers suggest, or refuse to launch, for reasons the model cannot see.

Where it sits

Ranked 26 of 126 desktop cards we model. Nearest faster: Radeon RX 7800 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT. Just below: GeForce RTX 4070 GDDR6, GeForce RTX 4070. Full method on the methodology page.