As the leaky taps in the Asian tech forumscape know no bounds, benchmarks of NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 (formerly known as the RTX 4080 16 GB) are already available. On the ChipHell forums, someone with access to an RTX 4080 sample and drivers put it through a series of artificial and gaming tests. The $1,200 MSRP graphics card was put to the test in games like Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 3, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider in addition to 3DMark Time Spy and Port Royal.

The RTX 4080 is discovered to be midway between the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090 in terms of performance. It boasts 71% the performance of an RTX 4090 at factory settings and in the 4K version of 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, compared to 55% for the RTX 3090 Ti. The RTX 4080 moves 2 percentage points closer to the RTX 4090 (73% of the RTX 4090) when its “power limit” slider is set to its maximum. With a little manual OC, it gains an additional 4 percentage points. With 3DMark Port Royal, things start to shift significantly, with the RTX 4080 performing 69% better than the RTX 4090 in a test where the RTX 3090 Ti performs 58% better than the RTX 4090.

A slightly different picture emerges from the game tests, where the RTX 4080 fared better than the RTX 4090. Only 15.7% quicker than the RTX 4080 in Forza Horizon 5 is the RTX 4090. The speed difference in CoD MWII is only 7.9%. However, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077 show the RTX 4090 to have a 30-plus percent advantage over the RTX 4080. Based on these figures, we forecast that the RTX 4080 will achieve notable performance improvements over the RTX 3080 (10 GB) from the previous generation and respectable gains over the RTX 3090 Ti, while lagging behind the RTX 4090 with just enough performance to prevent cannibalization.