I keep seeing people saying that the 3000 series of cards beat the newer 4000 series cards in some areas. Why and how do the 3080 series cards for instance beat the newer 4000 series cards? I’m a bit confused… Thank you!
In: Technology
In most of the instances where you see a GPU from a previous generation do better than one from a newer generation is due to how a particular game is designed and optimized.
In some instances, there are other factors involved such as the hardware that is paired with it. In theory, all 4080 GPUs should perform better than a 3080. But if for whatever you have a 4080 paired with a lower end GPU, system memory or motherboard than what is in the 3080, you might actually see substantial performance advantage on the 3080. The 4080 could be on a motherboard with an older generation PCIe slot which is slower. The CPU might be bottlenecked from something else which is most often the case when you hear about a new gen GPU being beat by the previous gen.
For example you might have a CPU near a bottleneck running a 3080, hitting some really high frames. Throw a 4080 in that same system, and you might see higher frames but at the cost of a lower average FPS because the CPU is bottlenecking, slowing down causing the GPU to wait and perform worse.
Traditionally, it’s been expected that boards of the same model tier punch up versus the previous generation’s model tier.
For example, a 2060 is expected to beat a 1070, a 3060 is expected to beat a 2070.
In the case of the 4000 series, across all the model tiers, they only outperformed the 3000 series at the same tier. 4060 only 3060 but not 3070.
I don’t think any of the 3000 gen cards at the same model tier beat any of the 4000 at the same. But for a cheaper price/used, you can buy a 3080 for under $600 that potentially outperforms a 4070 at the same price.
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