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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 review: performance worthy of the name?

It's slower than RTX 4090/5090 - but offers a lot more value.

Nvidia has something of a battle on its hands here with the RTX 5080 as in price vs performance terms it sits in a strange place. On the one hand, it is a highly performant GPU - but it is simply not as fast as the last-gen flagship, RTX 4090. And naturally, it'll be readily seen off by the RTX 5090 flagship. However, in terms of value, the 4K results in the table below are intriguing. At $1000 for the RTX 5080, the 5090 would need to cost $1560 to offer the same price/performance ratio. It does not - it's a two grand halo product. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 would need to cost $1200. It does not. Its retail price started at $1600. Obviously then, the RTX 5080 offers more value than flagships past and present. At the same time, there is the expectation of today's 80-class card to better the last-gen 90-class or Titan. RTX 5080 does not do that.

I've put together the table below that aggregates all of the data from the prior pages' metrics so you can see where the RTX 5080 sits - but I have to say, I do have some reservations about this kind of data, often used by hardware reviewers. While the performance differentials against prior 80-class cards are broadly indicative, there can be big swings moving from game to game, which often happens as different GPU architectures interact with different titles in different ways. The differences in results between RTX 5080, 5090 and 4090 can be pretty vast!

I'd also pay less attention to the 1440p and especially 1080p results as even using the fastest gaming CPU money can buy, paired with its preference in DDR5 memory, those results will be tainted to a certain degree by the fact that the CPU just can't keep up.

The results from the benchmarks are clear though: there's no real reason to upgrade from an RTX 4080 or 4080 Super unless DLSS 4 frame-gen is particularly appealing to you (but if you have a 4K 165Hz or 4K 240Hz screen, you may be tempted!). However, looking at the RTX 3080, 3080 Ti or 3090, there are compelling reasons to give this a go - depending on how performant the potentially decent RTX 5070 Ti turns out.

Avg Perf Differential 3840x2160 2560x1440 1920x1080
RTX 5090 156% 144% 133%
RTX 4090 120% 116% 113%
RTX 5080 100% 100% 100%
RTX 4080 Super 87% 89% 91%
RTX 3080 64% 64% 64%
RX 7900 XTX 79% 80% 79%

With that said, years on from the RTX 3080 release date, the epoch-making release from Nvidia continues to dominate value charts at its original $699 MSRP. So much so that even in the year 2025, it sits comfortably in second place in our 'USD per frame' chart. The sheer value of the RTX 3080 posed gigantic problems for the last-gen RTX 4080 when it came to reviews - and indeed pretty much every other mid to high-end card 40-series card Nvidia put out.

However, there are a couple of mitigating factors I feel worth adding. Firstly, I wonder how many people actually got an MSRP RTX 3080 during the Covid shortages. Secondly, since 2020, the cost of silicon has shot up and we've been through a period of remarkably high inflation. It's a shame that price/performance is now only slightly improving but the shock to the world economy has been profound, while the cost of denser process nodes has resulted in a number of issues - such as no realistic drop in price for Xbox and PlayStation consoles, for example.

Another factor to consider, which is a touch unfortunate is simply this: The RTX 5080 is the best GPU you can buy for a thousand notes. However, one of the key reasons that this is the case is that Nvidia has literally no competition in the higher-end price brackets. And even if there were rivals, Nvidia also has the best overall feature set - even if you aren't a big frame-gen fan, the transformer model upgrades to super resolution and ray reconstruction are phenomenal.

3840x2160 $USD Per Frame Original MSRP
1. RTX 5080 14.96 $999
2. RTX 3080 16.41 $699
3. RTX 4080 Super 17.06 $999
4. RX 7900 XTX 18.85 $999
5. RTX 5090 19.17 $1999
6. RX 7900 XT 19.66 $899
7. RTX 4090 20.02 $1999
8. RTX 4080 20.82 $1199
9. RX 6800 XT 22.37 $649
10. RX 6800 22.99 $579

Whether it's down to the lack of competition or simply the cost of doing business, there's a sense of the medicore about the RTX 5080 - but it does serve to highlight what a remarkable piece of technology the RTX 4090 was back in the day, where Nvidia essentially had the advantage of two process node jumps and the ambition to create a truly massive GPU. Without any fabrication improvements at all this time around, RTX 50 series is what it is - and we should start to grow accustomed to technologies like DLSS 4. If the economies don't make sense in creating bigger GPUs, it's going to be software that makes up the difference.

All of which leaves us with the next round of Blackwell GPUs to look forwards to, where I expect the value equation to start making more sense. The $750/£729 RTX 5070 Ti offers 83 percent of the shaders of the 5080, for example, and is built on the same GB203 processor. Meanwhile, 4090 comparisons put aside, there's certainly a great deal of expectation for the RTX 5070 at $549/£539. Thankfully, it looks like I can take a break from GPU reviewing for a short while, but rest assured that we'll be back with full reviews of both of those cards next month - and we're eagerly awaiting the RDNA 4 offerings from AMD too.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Analysis

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