RTX 3080 vs RTX 3090

The FP16 dense figure of 59.5 TFLOPS on the RTX 3080 stands against 71 TFLOPS dense on the RTX 3090. The FP16 with sparsity figure of 119 TFLOPS on the RTX 3080 stands against 142 TFLOPS with sparsity on the RTX 3090. The FP16 dense to FP32 ratio equals exactly 2 on both cards. Higher memory bandwidth of 936 GB/s versus 760 GB/s permits larger batch sizes during training or inference passes. INT8 dense performance of 238 TOPS on the RTX 3080 compares with 284 TOPS dense on the RTX 3090 while the sparsity versions reach 476 TOPS and 568 TOPS respectively. These ratios indicate proportional scaling in tensor operations when sparsity features remain enabled or disabled consistently across both GPUs.

The RTX 3080 suits deployments where power draw must stay at 320W and VRAM demand remains under 12 GB. Workloads that fit within the 760 GB/s bandwidth envelope avoid the extra 30W TDP of the alternative card. The lower INT8 dense rating of 238 TOPS still meets requirements when model size stays modest.

The RTX 3090 suits deployments that require the full 24 GB VRAM capacity and 936 GB/s bandwidth. Larger batch sizes become feasible with the additional memory while the 35.6 TFLOPS FP32 rating supports faster single precision kernels. NVLink availability further benefits multi GPU scaling scenarios.