From a hardware and performance point of view, the GeForce RTX 4080 is downright fantastic. However, we live in challenging times; with a war close to the EU border and soaring energy prices, life has become much more challenging and expensive. That does make products like those shown today harder to support; then again, we can't blame NVIDIA for the state of the world in 2022. We hope to see affordable low-energy products sooner rather than later from NVIDIA. As a piece of hardware all by itself, we can only applaud the 4080. The ADA GPU architecture can perform skillfully and excellently. A good chunk of extra shader cores brings in nearly 1.5x raw shader performance and even better Raytracing and Tensor core performance. Underlying technologies like Shader Execution Reordering (SER) and DLSS 3.0 make the new product and Series 4000 shine. The GeForce RTX 4080 offers staggering numbers. Starting at $1199, however, it's very expensive. If you have the wallet leniency and play games in Ultra HD or, at the very least, start at a monitor resolution of 2560x1440, we can't argue that it'll be a great addition towards any enthusiast-class gaming rig. Take Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 combined with DLSS 3.0, you can fly at 100+ FPS in the highest resolutions. Cyberpunk at UHD with raytracing and DLSS3 quickly passes 100 FPS. This purebred Ultra HD card shines in that area, whether shading (regularly rendered games) or hybrid ray-tracing + DLSS3 is used. Compared to the mighty 4090, this still is a more economical product series offering enormous performance. In closing, the RTX 4080 impresses and will keep you happy for years to come, but at a high cost and despite excellent perf per watt, with relatively high energy consumption levels. Never has built a new game PC been this expensive, but never have things been this fast.
