Nvidia Mass Test - Everything from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 4080

Introduction

Yes in the first of our mass retest reviews we're testing nearly every card of the last decade released under the Nvidia desktop brand. We often get people asking us how their early cards compare to the newer ones and our blanket reply is that once you are two generations behind you'll get an upgrade from almost anything. With the RTX launch Nvidia really broke new ground with the addition of hardware ray tracing support as well as the implementation of the game changing DLSS.

Whilst DLSS alone is enough to make the RTX cards leagues ahead of the GTX ones, those cards in themselves were greatly improved with the RTX 3000 series which stopped ray tracing being a nice thing to look at but too demanding to run all the time, to something you can leave on. If that wasn't revolutionary enough then the newest 4000 series cards have improved ray tracing still further, and with the addition of DLSS 3 and the mind-blowing Framegen technology they even put the 3000 series in the shade.

Rarely has a company released consecutive products that bludgeoned the generation before and broke our rule of skipping a generation to really reap the rewards, but since 2016 Nvidia have consistently smashed it out of the park. We thought it would be a great time to dig into the stack of cards we have on hand and test how the performance has changed in two different settings. Firstly we'll run our tests with the game in vanilla mode. No ray tracing. No DLSS or Framegen. Just pure performance. Then we're going to test with everything we have available to us turned on.

With titles that support DLSS 3 and Framegen (the 4000 series) that makes a massive difference, but everything from the 2060 upwards sees a boost from DLSS. As a standalone review we've also included a couple of the more popular online games where frames-per-second is everything, as well as The Witcher 3 in both launch and next-gen update modes to see how much horsepower you need to make CD Projekt Red's magnum opus look as good as it can. Let's get down to it.

Test Setup

Nvidia GTX 1060/1070/1080/1080Ti
Nvidia RTX 2060/2070/2080/2080Ti
Nvidia RTX 3060/3070/3080/3080Ti
Nvidia RTX 4070Ti/4080
Intel Core i9-13900KS
MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi V1.10 Bios
Corsair Veangeance RGB DDR5 6000Mhz
Kingston Fury Renegade 6000MHz 32GB
Sabrent Rocket 2TB
Corsair 5000T
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair H170i 420
Windows 11