RTX 3080 vs RTX 5070: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the RTX 5070 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3080 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Both the RTX 3080 and the RTX 5070 ship with 12 GB of VRAM.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. RTX 3080 from $0.187/GPU/hr; RTX 5070 from $0.331/GPU/hr. The RTX 3080 is 44% cheaper at the entry rate.
RTX 3080
Good for inference and small-scale training workloads
RTX 5070
Good for inference and light fine-tuning workloads
Last updated: 2026-10-10 20:21:53 UTCRefreshes hourly
Specs side by side
| Spec | RTX 3080 | RTX 5070 |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 12 GB | 12 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 760 GB/s | 672 GB/s |
| Architecture | Ampere | Blackwell |
| Compute capability | 8.6 | 12.0 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 |
| Peak FP16/BF16 tensor TFLOPS | 119 TFLOPS | 123.5 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP8 tensor TFLOPS | – | 246.9 TFLOPS |
| Max board power (TDP) | 320W | 250W |
| Regions | 2 | 1 |
On-demand price
| Rate | RTX 3080 | RTX 5070 |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $0.187/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) | $0.331/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) |
Which is better for AI: RTX 3080 or RTX 5070?
Choose the RTX 5070 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3080 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
RTX 3080 vs RTX 5070: common questions
Is the RTX 3080 or the RTX 5070 better for AI?
Short answer: choose the RTX 5070 when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the RTX 3080 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Is the RTX 3080 or the RTX 5070 cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the RTX 3080 starts at $0.187/GPU/hr (median $0.198/GPU/hr) and the RTX 5070 starts at $0.331/GPU/hr (median $0.331/GPU/hr). The RTX 3080 is the cheaper of the two at the entry rate, by 44%.
What is the difference between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 5070?
Both cards report 12 GB of VRAM; the RTX 3080 is an Ampere part and the RTX 5070 is Blackwell (compute capability 8.6 vs 12.0); only the RTX 5070 supports FP8 compute. On price, the RTX 3080 lists from $0.187/GPU/hr and the RTX 5070 from $0.331/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the RTX 3080 and the RTX 5070?
The RTX 3080 is listed in 2 regions and the RTX 5070 in 1 region right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the RTX 3080 vs the RTX 5070?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $187 on the RTX 3080 and $331 on the RTX 5070, a difference of $144 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the RTX 3080 have compared to the RTX 5070?
Both the RTX 3080 and the RTX 5070 ship with 12 GB of VRAM.
Does the RTX 3080 or the RTX 5070 support NVLink?
Neither the RTX 3080 nor the RTX 5070 has a 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 RTX 3080 page and RTX 5070 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 RTX 3080 VRAM calculator and the RTX 5070 VRAM calculator, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More RTX 3080 comparisons
More RTX 5070 comparisons
Related reading: RTX 3080 pricing and specs, The NVIDIA Inception program, explained, Google Colab alternatives for dedicated GPU access, Free GPU credits for students and researchers, and RunPod volume disk vs. network volume, compared.
