This review dives into the performance of Nvidia's RTX 5080 graphics card, comparing it to the RTX 4090, AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and other high-end GPUs. Explore its features, including DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, and assess its value for gamers.
Today Nvidia 's embargo on the performance of its GeForce RTX 5080 is lifting and we can finally see how its gaming performance compares to the RTX 4090 , and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. This RTX 5080 review follows the RTX 5090 review last week and while that costs an eye-watering $2,000, its massive performance means it's still likely to appeal to those with very large budgets.
At $1,000, the RTX 5080 is half the price, although a lot will depend on availability, with prices not expected to settle until well into February. However, with AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT not expected to offer competition for Nvidia's top-end cards, pricing may remain higher than expected, even for the RTX 5080. Below are the specifications for the new RTX 50-series graphics cards. Probably the key thing to note is just how much more powerful the RTX 5090 is than the RTX 5080. It has twice as much of nearly everything - double the memory, more than twice the CUDA cores and a memory bus that is twice as wide. This is why it's so expensive but thankfully that does also translate into amazing performance too. Two key features introduced with the RTX 50-series and its Blackwell architecture are DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation. The new Transformer model used in its DLSS upscaling brings image quality benefits and best of all is that, while the RTX 50-series has more hardware under the hood to deal with DLSS features, DLSS 4 is backwards compatible. That said, not all features are backward compatible with all RTX-capable graphics cards. Frame Generation is limited to the RTX 40-series and 50-series and Multi Frame Generation will only work on 50-series cards. Speaking of frame generation, the original feature added one artificially-generated frame in between each two normally-rendered frames. This saw big framerate benefits. With the RTX 50-series, this was turbocharged with Multi Frame Generation. This adds even more artificially-generated frames to the point that an average frame rate of 60fps can be boosted to well over 200fps. It is user-selectable, with one, two or three frames able to be added for every normally-rendered frame. It could be particularly useful for owners of lower-end RTX 50-series cards that find their hardware limiting when playing on high refresh rate monitors and needing higher frame rates, or simply to get silky-smooth frame rates in very demanding games. As usual, game support is key and so far 32GB of DDR5 6000 memory. All games were run at 4K resolution and where possible DLSS and Frame generation were turned on and off to get a range of results. For those that don't want to sift through all the individual graphs I've created overviews based on the average frame rate across all games both with and without Multi Frame Generation being used. These are very game-specific so results will vary compared to others that have tested this card today. I can also highly recommend checking out the likes of [insert website names] for their reviews as they offer similar overall views of performance across a wide range of titles. Without it, standard Frame Generation is used on AMD and Nvidia cards. In the lower graph, the highest frame rate using Multi Frame Generation was used for the RTX 5080 and 5090. As we can see above, without Multi Frame Generation, the RTX 4090 is quite a bit faster - 20% in fact, than the RTX 5080 in the games used here, but the RTX 5090 is nearly 50% faster. Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 Super and AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX are 10% and 22% slower and the RX 7900 XT is 34% slower. Enabling Multi Frame Generation in some of the game tests and picking those results for Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 sees the RTX 5080 overtake the RTX 4090 overall, but only by 1% thanks to the RTX 4090 lacking Multi Frame Generation support. Adding in more Multi Frame Generation titles would obviously see this figure rise and likely match Nvidia's launch claims. The RTX 5090 actually extends its lead, albeit by a single percentage point. The RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX were 26% and 40% slower respectively and the RX 7900 XT slips to 49% slower than the RTX 5080. If you're looking to play modern games that benefit from DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, then the RTX 5080 offers unparalleled performance that's bettered only by its bigger brother the RTX 5090. $1,000 is still a huge amount for a graphics card, but with 75 DLSS 4/Multi Frame Generation supporting titles available already, the catalogue of options is fairly wide, but clearly far from being a wide-ranging. It benefits the most dealing with modern games and turning on all the eye candy and if you can afford it, the RTX 5080 is much better value than the RTX 5090, which costs twice as much for around 50% more performance
RTX 5080 Nvidia Graphics Card Gaming Performance DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation RTX 4090 AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
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