Introduction

We have with us the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 iGame Vulcan OC graphics card. Over the past decade, we've come to expect nothing less than the most over the top custom-design cards from Colorful, and the company doesn't disappoint with its premium RTX 3080 "Ampere" offering. The Colorful Vulcan OC features the most elaborate cooling solution we've seen for an RTX 3080 so far, along with a very generous board electrical design and features you'd expect when paying the kind of monies the RTX 3080 demands. It's also designed for those who intend to push the RTX 3080 to the limit with serious overclocking because of the generous power-limit adjustment range.

The GeForce RTX 3080 "Ampere" is NVIDIA's latest flagship graphics card despite the fact that it sells the slightly faster RTX 3090 under the same GeForce brand. This is because the RTX 3080 is designed to provide 4K Ultra HD AAA gaming with RTX enabled, while the RTX 3090 with its 24 GB of memory provides more of an uplift over the RTX 3080 to creators than gamers. The "Ampere" graphics architecture is designed by NVIDIA to provide not just significantly higher performance than RTX 20-series "Turing," but also nearly double the performance of the GTX 10-series "Pascal," making it an ideal upgrade opportunity. An area of engineering focus also appears to be the significantly increased raytracing performance.



The GeForce "Ampere" architecture heralds NVIDIA's second generation of RTX, the groundbreaking real-time raytracing technology that sees the combination of conventional raster 3D graphics with raytraced elements, so the hybrid still looks generations ahead of conventional graphics. Raytracing adds realism to lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, global illumination, and, with "Ampere," even raytraced motion blur, which is very difficult to pull off in real time and was hence relegated to a post-processing effect. 2nd Generation RTX is a combination of new "Ampere" CUDA cores, which offer concurrent FP32+INT32 operations, new 2nd Generation RT cores that in addition to increased performance have fixed function-hardware for newer real-time ray-tracing effects, and the 3rd Generation Tensor core, which leverages the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA leverages AI for denoising its raytracing pipeline, and for its DLSS performance-enhancement feature.

The GeForce RTX 3080 is based on the same "GA102" silicon as the RTX 3090, the largest GeForce "Ampere" silicon. It has more than double the SIMD muscle as its predecessor, the RTX 2080, with a staggering 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, 272 tensor cores, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. To ensure a steady stream of data to these, the company sought to significantly increase the memory bandwidth by opting not just for 10 GB of memory across a 320-bit wide memory interface, but innovating a whole new memory standard—GDDR6X, which ticks at a blistering 19 Gbps, working out to 760 GB/s of memory bandwidth—70% higher than the RTX 2080. The "GA102" silicon is built on the new 8 nm silicon fabrication process at Samsung and takes advantage of the new PCI-Express 4.0 x16 bus standard—next gen in every way.

The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 iGame Vulcan OC supercharges the RTX 3080 with a powerful 26-phase VRM setup that pulls power from three 8-pin PCIe inputs and gives the card significantly increased power limits over the NVIDIA Founders Edition card. Cooling the beast is a massive triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution that features two aluminium fin stacks connected to a vapor-chamber plate and heat pipes. The cooler also features a really cool LCD display that can be configured to display hardware monitoring, or graphics. Its backplate is functional, using flattened heat pipes that spread heat better. By default, the card runs at a rated 1710 MHz boost, with the stock power limit of 320 W, which basically gets you RTX 3080 FE performance. The card does offer a dual-BIOS feature, with the second "Turbo" BIOS ticking at 1800 MHz boost with a 370 W limit—one of the highest for RTX 3080. Colorful is asking $880 (a $180 premium) for the iGame Vulcan OC. In this review, we put it through its paces.