Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition review: Incremental gains over the previous generation

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition takes the honor guard position for the RTX 5090. In times past, the penultimate Nvidia GPU of each generation has often been the best overall pick. But the gap between first and second place has widened significantly in the past two generations, at least for 4K gaming and other demanding workloads. The 5080 also takes over from the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super, often with only modest gains. It may still be one of the best graphics cards when the dust clears, but it doesn’t have the wow factor of its big brother.

Both the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 will go on sale tomorrow, January 30, 2025. While we anticipate a lot of demand for the halo card, the 5080 will hopefully be more readily available — but probably only after the initial wave of eager buyers clears. And there’s still the risk that businesses looking for affordable AI hardware might drive inventory shortages because while the 5080 can’t match a 5090 in raw performance, two of them would certainly provide plenty of computing for nominally the same price.

RTX 5080 will have the same core feature set, meaning stuff like native FP4 support that could entice AI researchers and developers. But it still ‘only’ has 16GB of VRAM, and many AI models tend to be voracious when it comes to memory requirements — though DeepSeek has certainly shaken many of the foundational thoughts about AI training and inference, as well as Nvidia’s stock price.

We were extremely crunched for time on the RTX 5090 review, and things have only been slightly better on the RTX 5080. There’s still a lot to dissect, and unfortunately, we can’t shake the feeling that the initial Blackwell drivers are holding the cards back. The 1080p results are particularly bad at times, and Nvidia’s heavy reliance on Multi Frame Generation (MFG) for the initial performance preview suggests that was probably at the forefront of the driver team’s work, rather than general performance.

You can check the boxout with additional links and information on the Nvidia Blackwell and RTX 50-series GPUs. The succinct story for the RTX 5080 is that, outside of certain AI workloads and MFG, it’s currently a pretty minor upgrade over the prior generation 4080 cards. (The 4080 Super was only a few percent faster, with its primary attraction being a $200 price cut compared to the vanilla model.) The specs basically say most of what you need to know.