Creatives will benefit from this top graphics card, if they can find one
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With the release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080content creators wonder if it’s worth investing in the powerful Graphics Card.
Now Puget Systems has run a series benchmark testing (opens in new tab) to see how well the GPU performs in a range of content creation software including Adobe Premiere Pro, Solve DaVinciand After effects.
And the results may surprise you.
Performance improvements
In assessing performance, the team compared Nvidia’s latest offering to the existing RTX 3000 series lineup alongside the GeForce RTX 2080Ti and rival AMD Radeon RX 6900XT.
Kick off with DaVinci Resolve – our top choice for best free video editing software – Puget Systems noted that “The four main areas for which the GPU is used are processing GPU effects, debayering (and optionally decoding) RAW media, and H.264/HEVC decoding/encoding.”
Overall, it turned out to offer a 10% performance boost compared to the RTX 3080 Ti, while staying about the same as the RTX 3090 Ti. However, this also took CPU-based tasks into account. On strictly graphics-driven tasks, such as OpenFX, DaVinci Resolve performed 18% faster compared to the 3080 Ti, and again proved to be about on par with the 3090 Ti.
When it came to Premiere Pro, the video editing software turned out to be only 5% faster than its predecessor overall – and about 7% faster than the RTX 3080 Ti for GPU-accelerated effects. The testing team also suggested that by using GPU-guided plug-ins for noise reduction and the like, users could get even more performance gains.
When testing Adobe’s VFX software, benchmarking showed similar scores in Nvidia’s RTX 30 and RTX 40 series. While it’s worth noting that this is down to the fact that After Effects (and many After Effects Alternatives) are hindered by the Processor.
Game development and 3D modeling and rendering software was also put under the microscope.
With Unreal Engine, the RTX 4080 saw an almost 70% jump in frame rates over the RTX 3080 (and just over 40% compared to the RTX 3080 Ti. Improved performance over older graphics was also seen in V- Ray (75% faster), OctaneRender (67% faster), Maxon Redshift (60% faster) and Blender (80% faster), but in each of these tests the meatier RTX 4090 beat the RTX 4080 by some margin – much to the surprise of exactly none.
So far, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 has proven to be as popular as it is hard to find in stores. If you’re looking to upgrade your GPU, we do live stock updates in our guide Where to buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and check out the best Black Friday graphics card deals.