H100 vs RTX 3080: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the RTX 3080 when 12 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the RTX 3080 has 12 GB.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. H100 from $2.78/GPU/hr; RTX 3080 from $0.132/GPU/hr. The RTX 3080 is 95% cheaper at the entry rate.
H100
Good for training and serving frontier-scale LLMs
RTX 3080
Good for inference and small-scale training workloads
Last updated: 2026-11-03 UTCRefreshes every 6 hours
Specs side by side
| Spec | H100 | RTX 3080 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 80 GB | 12 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 3.35 TB/s | 760 GB/s |
| Architecture | Hopper | Ampere |
| Compute capability | 9.0 | 8.6 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | 989 TFLOPS | 119 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP8 tensor TFLOPS | 1,979 TFLOPS | – |
| NVLink / multi-GPU interconnect | NVLink 4, 900 GB/s bidirectional | – |
| Max board power (TDP) | Up to 700W (configurable) | 320W |
| Form factor | SXM5 | PCIe 3.0 x16 |
| Regions | 7 | 2 |
On-demand price
| Rate | H100 | RTX 3080 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $2.78/GPU/hr | $0.132/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) |
Which is better for AI: H100 or RTX 3080?
Choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the RTX 3080 when 12 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
H100 vs RTX 3080: common questions
Is the H100 or the RTX 3080 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the H100 when 80 GB of VRAM is the gating requirement. Choose the RTX 3080 when 12 GB is enough for the workload and the lower hourly rate points that way.
Is the H100 or the RTX 3080 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the H100 starts at $2.78/GPU/hr (median $3.70/GPU/hr) and the RTX 3080 starts at $0.132/GPU/hr (median $0.307/GPU/hr). The RTX 3080 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 95%.
What is the difference between the H100 and the RTX 3080?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM against the RTX 3080's 12 GB; the H100 is a Hopper part and the RTX 3080 is Ampere (compute capability 9.0 vs 8.6); only the H100 supports FP8 compute. On price, the H100 lists from $2.78/GPU/hr and the RTX 3080 from $0.132/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the H100 and the RTX 3080?
The H100 is listed in 7 regions and the RTX 3080 in 2 regions right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the H100 vs the RTX 3080?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $2,778 on the H100 and $132 on the RTX 3080, a difference of $2,646 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the H100 have compared to the RTX 3080?
The H100 has 80 GB of VRAM; the RTX 3080 has 12 GB.
Does the H100 or the RTX 3080 support NVLink?
The H100 supports NVLink 4, 900 GB/s bidirectional; the RTX 3080 has no dedicated GPU-to-GPU interconnect.
How this comparison is calculated
Every price is normalized to a per-GPU hourly rate using the same pipeline as every other pricing surface on Aquanode, and only the cheapest qualifying offer per provider is shown. A dash means that provider does not currently list that GPU.
Architecture, compute capability and supported precisions come from each vendor's published datasheet for that generation, not from the marketplace feed. This page regenerates at most once per hour.
Memory bandwidth, tensor TFLOPS, NVLink/interconnect and max board power are the same verified-from-datasheet figures shown on each model's own H100 page and RTX 3080 page, which link the primary vendor source for that model. A dash here means Aquanode hasn't verified that figure from a primary source yet, never a guess.
Go further
Check what fits in each card's memory with the H100 VRAM calculator and the RTX 3080 VRAM calculator, see vendor-published throughput in the GPU benchmarks and specs table, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More H100 comparisons
More RTX 3080 comparisons
Related reading: H100 pricing and specs, H100 vs H200, A100 vs H100, H100 and H200: SXM vs NVL vs PCIe, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
