In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Gainward Blower 8GB.

The RTX 2080 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce RTX 3080, but the GeForce RTX 3080 has 28 more Texture Mapping Units than the RTX 2080. As a result, the GeForce RTX 3080 exhibits a 26.5 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the RTX 2080. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The RTX 2080 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce RTX 3080 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the RTX 2080 providing 4.8 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GeForce RTX 3080 was released over a year more recently than the RTX 2080, and so the GeForce RTX 3080 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the RTX 2080.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The GeForce RTX 3080 has 2048 MB more video memory than the RTX 2080, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The RTX 2080 has 448 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce RTX 3080, which means that the memory performance of the RTX 2080 is massively better than the GeForce RTX 3080.

The GeForce RTX 3080 has 8704 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce RTX 2080 Gainward Blower 8GB has 2944. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce RTX 3080 is 14884 and the actual shader performance of the RTX 2080 is 5034. The GeForce RTX 3080 having 9850 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the RTX 2080 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce RTX 3080 transistor size technology is 4 nm (nanometers) smaller than the RTX 2080. This means that the GeForce RTX 3080 is expected to run very slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the RTX 2080.

The GeForce RTX 3080 requires 320 Watts to run and the GeForce RTX 2080 Gainward Blower 8GB requires 215 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the GeForce RTX 3080 and a PSU with at least 650 Watts for the RTX 2080. The GeForce RTX 3080 requires 105 Watts more than the RTX 2080 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce RTX 3080 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RTX 2080.