Game Testing & Performance

Ashes of the Singularity

Planet by planet, a war is raging across the galaxy. The technological singularity has given humanity the power to expand further than they ever have before. Now, they compete with each other and their sentient artificial intelligence adversaries for control of newfound worlds.

Our first game test can’t show off the 3080 Gaming X Trio’s prowess here as we are pegging out a CPU core or two at lower resolutions. A CPU with faster core clocks would be able to handle this a little better, but you don’t normally buy a flagship card to play RTS games at low resolution.

MSI’s RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio holds a 10-15% lead here at 4K.

Far Cry 5

Anything can happen. Everything will.

Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult—known as The Project at Eden’s Gate—that is threatening the community’s freedom. Stand up to the cult’s leaders, Joseph Seed, and the Heralds, as you spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community.

The 1080p and even 1440p don’t see much gain here, but that’s actually because our Ryzen 9 3900X is getting 2 cores pegged out at lower resolutions and is bottlenecking the 3080 Gaming X Trio. A good overclock or an Intel CPU that can sustain 5+ GHz here would see a much higher score at low resolution.

As Far Cry 5 isn’t extremely demanding, many people play at 1440p. The RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio leads easily here, but again, the card is overpowered in this game for this CPU and is limited in performance.

Far Cry New Dawn
Face off against the Highwaymen and their leaders, the Twins as you fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic frontier. Form unexpected alliances, build a deadly arsenal of makeshift weapons using the remnants of the old world.

Even in the newer title, we again see such a powerful card causing a CPU bottleneck at a lower resolution.

Out at 4K where the RTX 3080 can stretch its legs, it easily walks away from the former generation with a 50% lead of the RTX 2080.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Experience Lara Croft’s defining moment as she becomes the Tomb Raider. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara must master a deadly jungle, overcome terrifying tombs, and persevere through her darkest hour. As she races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, Lara will ultimately be forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.

MSI’s RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is more than capable of maxing everything out in 4K with awesome frame rates, but if you are one of the few who has a high refresh rate 4K monitor, DLSS will let you put an even bigger dent in it.

It’s amusing that the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio in raw 4K rendering that the RTX 2080Ti is while upscaling with RTX. As an RTX 2080Ti owner, this kind of hurts.

Metro Exodus
Metro Exodus is an epic, story-driven first-person shooter from 4A Games that blends deadly combat and stealth with exploration and survival horror in one of the most immersive game worlds ever created.

We all know turning on Ray tracing hurts and makes a noticeable impact on performance. The white bar represents normal Rastering, and the Orange bar is the FPS with Ray Tracing enabled. Once we add DLSS back to the equation, we actually slightly pass RTX off at 4K, and get close at 1440p. DLSS is used for rendering a lower resolution and then upscaling to the desired output, so we can’t really use it at 1080p here.

DLSS certainly helps gain some performance back, but the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio doesn’t really need the assistance to maintain solid frame rates with RTX On.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Civilization VI offers new ways to engage with your world: cities now physically expand across the map, active research in technology and culture unlocks new potential, and competing leaders will pursue their own agendas based on their historical traits as you race for one of five ways to achieve victory in the game.

While Civilization VI gives you scores in average turn times, you can almost look at them like frames per second to make it easier to understand. Here, 4K comes in at 6.62ms or around 151 FPS.

Again, we see the 3080 Gaming X Trio just decimate everything that came prior. It SHOULD be compared to the former RTX 2080, but it just flattens the previous flagship 2080Ti, and the 2080 isn’t even in the taillights.

Quake II RTX

Quake II RTX is a cutting-edge, ray-traced reimagining of id software’s old school classic, by NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios. Global lighting effects, including realistic reflections, refraction, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination are a result of the path-traced simulation of light.

While it may not be exactly double, the 3080 Gaming X Trio comes close to doubling the frame rate of the 2080 at 4K.

Minecraft with RTX (Beta)

Minecraft with RTX brings fully path-traced rendering, physically-based materials, and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to Minecraft, delivering bleeding-edge visual fidelity and realism that can be experienced on all GeForce RTX GPUs

MSI’s RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G can pull playable frame rates in raw 4K RTX mode without DLSS, but with DLSS upscaling enabled, you get an average of around 56 FPS.

At 4K, the 3080 Alone can power through raw Ray Tracing at mostly playable frame rates. Once you enable DLSS, it becomes butter smooth.