Nvidia RTX 5080 review: the new 4K gaming king of graphics cards
Smaller and faster than the Nvidia RTX 4080 for the same $999 price
🏆 Review score: 4.5 out of 5
Editors Choice
Pros:
✅ 🎮 Drives 4K 60fps for most games
✅ 📺 Multi-Frame Generation pushes 4K 120fps and higher on high-end gaming displays
✅ 🖼️ New DLSS 4 Transformer Model improves super-resolution textures and lighting
✅ 🫰 No price increase over the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
Cons
❌ 🔌 Higher energy draw than the RTX 4080
❌ 👾 MFG can produce some noticeable stuttering
❌ ⏸️ Moderate to small performance increase over the Nvidia RTX 4080
Shortcut Review
Of all the graphics cards in Nvidia’s family, the RTX xx80 GPU has had the hardest time lately. The original RTX 4080 became a meme of such inadequate value that the RTX 4080 Super was practically introduced as an apology. Now, the Nvidia RTX 5080 is out to set things right, and it’s mostly gotten there with decent native 4K gaming. Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) helps push this GPU to be fast enough for any 4K gaming TV and monitor.
The Nvidia RTX 5080 comes priced at $999, like the RTX 4080 Super before it, and $200 less than the original RTX 4080. That price also makes it exactly half as expensive as the Nvidia RTX 5090 I reviewed previously. This GPU, however, offers up more than half as much graphical power as Nvidia’s top flagship card. It’s more than potent enough to deliver 4K 60fps gaming for most titles, and with the help of MFG, it can also fully power 4K 120fps gaming TVs and monitors for high-speed gaming.
That all makes the Nvidia RTX 5080 the best choice graphics card for 4K gaming for most people over the twice as expensive RTX 5090. Nvidia’s flagship card is still the card I would pick if you absolutely want to have natively rendered 4K 60fps gameplay or your display runs above 120fps. The upgrade path for Nvidia RTX 4080 Super owners is hazier as the RTX 5080 only adds moderate to small performance increases. MFG is the main, and only, selling point of the Nvidia RTX 5080.
Full Review
🥑 Not half price for half performance. Is the RTX 5080 half as good as the RTX 5090 for half the price? No, not exactly. The RTX 5080 keeps up surprisingly well with the RTX 5090 as seen with the synthetic benchmarks below. The performance gap between these two flagship models is wider in the gaming benchmarks – but it’s still nowhere close to being half as powerful as the RTX 5090.
📺 4K gaming-ready (mostly). This card is more than powerful enough to render high-quality and ray-traced 4K gaming at 60fps without DLSS for a majority of games I played: Forza Horizon 5, Helldivers 2, and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. However, it’s not as completely bulletproof for 4K 60fps gaming as the RTX 5090, and it relies on DLSS to help it overcome that hurdle with games like CyberPunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy. A few even more challenging games like Star Wars: Outlaws force the RTX 5080 to lean on Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation technology.
👯Multi-Frame Generation on. Multi-frame generation is more of a necessity for the Nvidia RTX 5080, whereas I was just doing ridiculous things with it and the RTX 5090, like playing CyberPunk 2077 at 400fps. MFG is especially necessary and practical on the RTX 5080 if you have it hooked up to a high-frame-rate 4K display. You practically need MFG to get the frame rate high enough to see 120Hz or 240Hz gaming on your gaming TV/monitor. Just look at the frame rate boost multi-frame generation provided in the following tests.
🔍 Imperceptable fakes. Now, all these extra frames MFG produces aren’t exactly “real.” Rather it’s an extension of the DLSS 3 Frame Generation, where the GPU will look at the difference between two real frames and fill in the gap with two to four generated frames. Even with so many frames generated on the fly, I couldn’t really tell the difference between a real or “fake” frame. Instead, I was more enraptured with seeing 4K gaming at mostly steadily high frame rates.
👾 MFG isn’t foolproof. The RTX 5080 produces more noticeable studders with MFG enabled than the RTX 5090, and it’s most apparent when the frame rate drops by 20 to 40 fps. Luckily, this only happened a few times while thoroughly testing the feature in Hogwarts Legacy. MFG also introduces a bit more latency as high as 50 ms, but amazingly, this latency doesn’t increase as you increase the level of MFG.
🤖 Transform and roll out. DLSS 4 super-sampling has also seen a big improvement thanks to Nvidia’s new transformer model. DLSS has massively helped improve frame rates, and this new transformer model smooths out more artifacts while rendering greater details with more stable ray tracing. It also generates higher-quality textures with Super Resolution and Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA).
⚡️ Better looking and less latency. I tested the new transformer model with CyberPunk 2077, and I saw clearer textures and fewer shimmering artifacts while looking up at sun streaks through a palm tree. Another advantage of DLSS 4’s transformer model is that it produces less latency (34.7 ms) than the traditional CSC method (38.7 ms).
🚰 Trickle down improvements. Possibly the best thing about DLSS 4’s improvements is they’ll also help older-generation graphics cards. Nivida 40-series GPUs are getting more efficient frame generation. Meanwhile, 30-series and even 20-series cards can tap into the improved transformer model. Nvidia is also propping up DLSS 4’s overall launch on January 30 with over 75 supported titles, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and God of War Ragnarok.
⏲️ When and where can I buy the RTX 5080? The Nvidia RTX 5090 pre-order time is January 30 at 9 am ET (6 am PT), and so is the RTX 5080. And you’ll be able to purchase 5080 for $999 to start with the Founders Edition I tested from Nvidia’s web store and Best Buy. Alternatively, there will be dozens of partner card variants from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, and more on Newegg, Amazon, and Microcenter.
Should you buy the Nvidia RTX 5080?
Yes, if…
✅ 🎮 You want to play more PC games at 4K 60fps
✅ 📺 You have an HDMI 2.1 gaming TV or monitor for 4K 120fps gameplay
✅ 🏎️ You want to be on the cutting edge of Nvidia’s AI graphics roadmap
No, if…
❌ 👾 You want (mostly) natively rendered 4K 60fps gaming (get the Nvidia RTX 5090 instead)
❌ 👥 You can’t get past the idea of fake frames
❌ 🤔 You’re looking for a serious power increase over the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.