Both cards were measured first-party on our bench, same suite, same test rig.
What the numbers say
The gap is widest in Stable Diffusion XL, where NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) leads by 57% (4.18 vs 6.56 images/min); the closest fight is Qwen3 4B (35% apart); VRAM decides part of this one: NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) runs 6 of our 12 AI workloads while the other card runs 3, models that don't fit score zero.
Benchmark results head-to-head
Benchmark
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)
Difference
Qwen3 4B tok/s
148.46
110.18
+35%
Llama 3.1 8B tok/s
98.34
66.59
+48%
Qwen2.5-Coder 14B tok/s
0
36.34
n/a
Qwen3 32B tok/s
0
0
n/a
Llama 3.3 70B tok/s
0
0
n/a
Stable Diffusion XL images/min
4.18
6.56
-36%
FLUX.1 dev images/min
0
0
n/a
FLUX.1 Kontext dev images/min
0
0
n/a
Qwen-Image-Edit images/min
0
0
n/a
LTX-Video (distilled) frames/s
0
2.06
n/a
Wan 2.2 5B (720p) frames/s
0
0.18
n/a
Specifications compared
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)
VRAM
11GB
20GB
Architecture
Turing (TU102)
Ada Lovelace
Memory bandwidth
616 GB/s
360 GB/s
Boost clock
1,545 MHz
2,175 MHz
TDP
250 W
130 W
Launch MSRP
$1,199
$1,250
Release
2018-09-20
2023-08-09
FAQ
Which is better for ai & machine learning: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition or NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)?
NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) performs better for ai & machine learning, winning 4 of 11 benchmarks in our suite with an average -0.4% advantage.
What are the main hardware differences between NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition and NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)?
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition has 11GB VRAM and a 250W TDP, while NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) has 20GB VRAM and a 130W TDP.
Does VRAM matter more than speed between NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition and NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)?
For AI, yes, NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) fits 4 more of our 12 workloads than NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. A model that exceeds VRAM doesn't run slower, it doesn't run at all, so the card that fits the model wins that workload outright.
Where is the biggest performance difference between NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition and NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation)?
Stable Diffusion XL: NVIDIA RTX 4000 (Ada Generation) leads by roughly 57% (4.18 vs 6.56 images/min) in our testing.