By As soon as I saw where Nvidia’s new $999 graphics card stood in our gaming benchmarks, that thought came to mind. The ostentatious $1,999 GeForce RTX 5090 bullied its way to the top of the performance charts with a tantalizing blend of raw muscle and DLSS 4 innovation. The more restrained approach of the still pricey but more accessible RTX 5080 results in unsatisfactory performance gains. Despite being the top graphics card in its weight class, it hardly outperforms the 4080 Super it replaces, let alone the still-powerful RTX 4090.
The RTX 5080 is therefore even more dependent on DLSS 4, the latest Nvidia technology that can add up to three AI-generated frames in between each conventionally displayed frame. Although it is a genuinely amazing feature to experiment with, sending frame rates and visual smoothness skyrocketing, will it be sufficient to compensate for a GPU that, to be honest, only provides a little generational performance boost?
Unbelievably, the new features in DLSS 4 enhance the feel of your games and give even janky performers a startling sense of speed and snappiness. Woof. This will be a challenging one. For a comparison of all the tests we have conducted, see Adam and Will’s video below. Here, we will concentrate on the essential information prospective RTX 5080 purchasers should be aware of before shelling out a cool thousand for Nvidia’s newest, and undoubtedly contentious, enthusiast graphics card.
The 4080 Super is significantly quicker than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080.
I brought up the fact that the RTX 5080 only has roughly 10% more CUDA cores than the 4080 when we examined the RTX 50-series’ technical specifications following their announcement. Performance could be improved by architecture changes, a higher power consumption, and the switch to state-of-the-art GDDR7 memory, but the RTX 5080 was not expected to represent a significant advancement. Unfortunately, in our gaming benchmarks, it simply offered a clumsy foot-shuffle forward.
The GeForce RTX 5080 is just 15% faster at 4K resolution than the $999 RTX 4080 Super across our suite, which uses a variety of gaming engines, genres, and ray tracing levels. (The vanilla 4080 cost $1,200 when it first came out, but it failed and was replaced by the less expensive Super.) That is disappointing. A new generation of graphics cards should enhance performance by 25 to 30 percent. Some games have better or poorer performance.
ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX ™ 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition Gaming Graphics Card
The uplift in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a mere 10%. In the game, Cyberpunk 2077, which was created in close cooperation with Nvidia, the RTX 5080 outperformed the 4080 Super by 32%. But generally speaking, most games should see an uplift of roughly 15%.
The RTX 5080 will be made or broken by DLSS 4.
Watch the time-stamped video above to hear the Full Nerd crew talk about their experience using DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Gen. However, the GeForce RTX 5080 has a secret weapon: Nvidia’s incredibly powerful new DLSS 4 technology. More precisely, GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards are the only ones with the new Multi Frame Gen capability. It expands upon the Frame Generation function that was first implemented in the 40-series.
Multi Frame Gen adds up to three AI-generated images between frames to boost frame rates even more, whereas the previous Frame Generation adds a single AI-generated frame between two “traditionally” rendered frames. Meanwhile, the latency brought on by the AI frames is reduced using Nvidia’s required-for-Frame-Gen Reflex technology. It is a great feeling. Enabling MFG greatly improves the appearance and feel of supported games, such as Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk.
Take a look at this endorsement from our 5090 reviews: Will Smith, a contributor who is researching DLSS 4 in further detail, offers even more laudatory remarks: According to him, activating DLSS 4 makes the enjoyable third-person game Star Wars Outlaws feel as nice as the renowned Doom 2016, which many players view as the pinnacle of fast-action shooters. He remarked, “It is like a whole new game.” With MFG active in Cyberpunk 2077, I have spent time tooling about Night City’s streets. Particularly in a game that runs damned smoothly, it is incredible how much faster and smoother everything feels.
Is the GeForce RTX 5080 a good purchase?
Consider the RTX 5080 only if you support Nvidia’s AI-powered future vision or if you need excellent 4K and 1440p gaming performance and are using a graphics card that is many generations old. This is the fastest graphics card in the $999 weight class, even with the little performance increase. To be believed, the Multi Frame Generation function of DLSS 4 must be seen (and felt).
We contrasted the transition from Single Frame to Multi Frame Generation with the transition from DLSS 1 to DLSS 2 on the Full Nerd podcast. Both technologies had many flaws when they were first released, but they showed promise. Gamers remarked that Nvidia did a fantastic job with DLSS 2. Even if it is not flawless, Multi Frame Generation does a fantastic job. I would not be shocked if the online commotion about “false frames” subsided significantly if more players were able to use MFG in more than 75 games and apps and got their Dorito-stained hands-on RTX 50-series GPUs. It changes the game.
