RTX 3080 review: Nothing left to fake

Nearly two years ago, I wrote my review for the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080. My takeaway was that Nvidia was pulling the “fake it ’til you make it” routine as part of an effort to shove gaming graphics toward a real-time ray-tracing future. Now, with the RTX 3080, that seems like the right move because RTX has fully arrived.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 video card is launching this week for $700. It’s a high-end GPU with a focus on ray tracing, but it’s also a beast for traditional rasterized rendering techniques as well. What’s more important is that Nvidia has used the last two years to push past the growing pains of moving to a new rendering technology. And that makes the RTX 3080 — and likely the entire 30-series — feel like the right time to make an upgrade for anyone who was waiting.