Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card outruns its like-priced competitors and predecessors in many popular games. Its potent AI hardware and cutting-edge AI features, as they gain support, will only improve this card's standing.

While we didn’t give the RTX 5090 Founders Edition an award or a rating, we were much more impressed by this NVIDIA RTX 5080 Founders Edition model and its MSRP price. No revolution in terms of performance, but a reasonable price for performance that’s close to that of the RTX 4090. We’ll see tomorrow whether the RTX 5080 custom versions will have the same appeal.

The GeForce RTX 5080's raw performance uplift over the RTX 4080 might be underwhelming, but there's a lot more to the story - especially with DLSS 4. In Founders Edition form, the RTX 5080 is a remarkable 4K gaming GPU and a game changer for those upgrading from a GeForce RTX 3080.

With GeForce RTX 5080, Nvidia cements Blackwell graphics cards as the go-to for gamers, content creators, and AI enthusiasts. Much like GeForce RTX 5090, it arrives on the scene with no equal yet carries a slimmer $999 price tag than RTX 4080 to lower the barrier to entry. No small chunk of change, but those with deep enough pockets will find value, even compared to the flagship. It’s half the price, but always more than half its performance.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is an extremely competent 4K graphics card for its price. It’s just not quite the performance uplift that hardcore enthusiasts who upgrade every generation are going to want to see.

The GeForce RTX 5080 offers negligible improvement over the 4080 Super’s performance, which is a massive bummer — but also offers a truly game-changing feature in DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, which supercharges frame rates and visual smoothness. It’s sure to be controversial.

The RTX 5080 Founders Edition uses the same lovely shroud as the top RTX Blackwell card, and brings the same DLSS/MFG feature set to the table. But that's all that is really setting the second-tier card apart from the RTX 4080 Super as the gen-on-gen performance difference is marginal at best. It might not be an exciting GPU, but at least the veneer of Multi Frame Generation will make it feel like a generational leap to most gamers.

For $1000, there is no reason you should buy RTX 4080 or RTX 4080 Super now. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX is $820, or 18% cheaper, but it's also 15% slower in raster, and 38% slower in RT. NVIDIA is also very strong in software features, the new DLSS Transformer model is a game-changer and DLSS 4 multi-frame-generation is a notable selling point, too. No way I would buy RX 7900 XTX at that price instead of RTX 5080—maybe if AMD drops the price considerably.