Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Card Performance Hierarchy

How do Nvidia's Ampere RTX 30-series GPUs stack up five years later?

Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs with the RTX 3080 10GB card on September 17, 2020 — very nearly five years ago as I write this. It followed that with the RTX 3090 one week later, and then the RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3060 12GB, and RTX 3050 8GB over the following months. A bit less than one year after the initial launch, Nvidia then released the 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti, with the final RTX 3090 Ti coming in the spring of 2022.

The GPUs were all good on paper, for the most part, but at the time of launch virtually every one of these graphics cards ended up being a massive disappointment for gamers. Pardon me if I'm dredging up old memories that might still cause PTSD, but late 2020 through early 2022 was a perfect storm of awfulness in the graphics card industry. Ethereum mining was massively profitable during portions of that time, to the point where miners were scooping up every viable GPU and were often willing to pay over triple the MSRPs. On top of that, we had the Covid pandemic causing more people to work from home — or stay home to play games — and plenty of folks were upgrading their PCs. Massive GPU shortages ensued.

But now all of that is past, and we have had two new generations of Nvidia GPUs in the interim, the RTX 40-series using the Ada Lovelace architecture arrived beginning in the fall of 2022, and then the RTX 50-series with the Blackwell architecture launched at the start of 2025. You wouldn't necessarily go out and buy a new RTX 30-series GPU today, but how do these older generation GPUs compare to the modern stuff?

Introducing the 2025 GPU Hierarchy Testbed

Every benchmark suite begins with a selection of the appropriate testbed. For the GPU hierarchy, we want the fastest possible system to go with our graphics cards, ensuring that nothing else holds the GPU back — as much as we can, at least. The reality is that lower settings and resolutions are less demanding, so 1080p testing in particular simply won't allow the fastest cards to reach their full potential. Faster CPUs routinely come out, but often the gains are only 5–10 percent, so we want to make the most of what's available. Which brings us to our component choices.

GPU Testbed
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU
Asus ROG Crosshair 870E Hero
G.Skill 2x16GB DDR5
Crucial T705 4TB SSD
Corsair HX1500i PSU
Cooler Master 280mm AIO

Right now, the crown for the fastest CPU for gaming goes to the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's "only" an 8-core, 16-thread CPU, but the number of games that truly push more than eight CPU-heavy threads can probably be counted on one hand. More importantly, having a large 64MB L3 cache stacked on top of the existing 32MB L3 cache — that's the "X3D" part of the model name — proves extremely beneficial for a lot of games. Not everything benefits to the same degree, but overall the 9800X3D generally outpaces the more expensive 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X3D. That's because the 9950X3D only has the extra L3 cache on one of the two 8-core chiplets, and the extra traffic between the various chips works against the higher core counts in most games. It certainly helps that the 9800X3D costs $320 less.

Welcome to the GPU Hierarchy

Hey there! If you're a long-time reader of my blog (all ten of you), you're going to see a name change. I've rebranded as The GPU Hierarchy, and testing of graphics card performance will be my primary goal going forward.

What started out as a blog about cryptocurrency mining WAAAY back in the day has morphed quite a bit. I haven't done any mining in years, as it has become generally unprofitable — especially considering the upfront hardware costs — but I do know a lot about graphics cards. If you know who I am and my employment history, that shouldn't be a surprise, but I'm going to try to stay mostly anonymous here.

Yes, it's been about two years since I wrote anything here. My full-time job was keeping me very busy. Now I've got a bit more freetime, so I'm going to put that to good use.

I've been testing (and retesting...) all of the modern graphics card for a while, and I'm going to start publishing a full suite of performance results. We'll have tables and charts of performance data, along with power, efficiency, and other metrics. Everything will be linked to Amazon listings (or at least a search of Amazon listings), which helps support the site. But more importantly, I want this to become a great resource for people looking to purchase or upgrade their gaming GPU.

I've assembled a test suite of 15 reasonably modern games, three of which have ray tracing effects enabled. That's 20% of games with RT enabled, and I feel that's probably about as much weight as ray tracing deserves. Upscaling and frame generation techniques will be left off, because I view those as performance enhancements rather than baseline measurements.

To be clear, I routinely enable DLSS and FSR when gaming, but fundamentally those differ in appearance — with XeSS being the red-headed stepchild that differs yet again. Plus we now have DLSS 2/3/4, FSR 2/3/4, and XeSS 1.x/2.x as options, all of which look and perform differently! Perhaps that's a story for another day and some deeper investigations, but for now we'll stick with reference performance.

So, welcome back if you've been here before (when it was hosted at HolyNerdvana). If you're new, welcome to my graphics card blog and site. I'm a veteran of the GPU industry, having tested and reviewed a variety of hardware for over two decades. I know a lot about GPUs and graphics cards, I have a variety of opinions, and this is where I'll be sharing them now.

This is a fully independent website, meaning there's no big publisher telling me what to write, when to write it, and how often I should spend a long weekend looking for BS Black Friday, Prime Day, Labor Day, etc. deals. Just the straight stuff here. I hope you find it useful, and comments are welcome. Note also the general lack of advertising, which should hopefully mean the pages load quickly. If things go well, maybe I'll get some sponsorships, but I hope to keep such things to a minimum — a throwback to the good old days of the web.