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

Nvidia RTX 5080 Test Setup

We've revamped our test suite and our test PC, wiping the slate clean and requiring new benchmarks for every graphics card we want to have in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. That will take time, and as with the 5090 review, we'll only have a handful of cards in this review. Partly, that's because there's not much that directly competes with the RTX 5080. It's a thousand-dollar card, so really it's just the previous generation 4080-class (we'll use the 4080 Super), plus the 5090 and 4090, and AMD's fastest card, the RX 7900 XTX.

The Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs also bring some new technologies that require separate testing. Chief among these (for gamers) is the new DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation (MFG). That requires new benchmarking methods, and we spent some additional time with some DLSS 4-enabled games to get a better idea of how they look and feel. As with DLSS 3 frame generation, MFG isn't a magic bullet that makes everything faster and better. It adds latency, and the experience also depends on the GPU, game, settings, and monitor you're using.

MFG can potentially double the number of AI-generated frames (DLSS 4 can generate 1, 2, or 3 depending on the setting you select), smoothing out the appearance on your display. However, user input gets sampled only on the rendered frames, so MFG in 4X mode running at "160 FPS" would only be sampling the mouse and keyboard at 40 FPS. Our experience so far is that there's a minimum FPS that's needed for MFG to feel playable, and a higher level FPS where it starts to feel smooth and responsive.

Our GPU test PC has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, the fastest current CPU for gaming purposes. (We also tested the RTX 5090 on our old 13900K test bed, so check the prior review for those results. Suffice it to say that, at 4K, things are much closer than at 1080p.) We also have 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory from G.Skill with AMD EXPO timing enabled (CL30) on an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard.

We're running Windows 11 24H2, with the latest drivers at the time of testing. We used AMD's 24.12.1 drivers, Nvidia's preview 571.86 drivers for the RTX 5090, 4090, and 4080 Super, and slightly newer 572.02 drivers for the RTX 5080. (Newer 572.12 preview drivers arrived on Monday, to address some issues in Alan Wake 2 and Hogwarts Legacy. We'll be retesting those games with the new drivers "soon.") Our understanding is that the only real difference for our test suite is that the new drivers have support for the 5080.

Our PC is hooked up to an MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED display, which supports G-Sync and Adaptive-Sync, allowing us to properly experience the higher frame rates that GPUs like the 5080 and 5090 can deliver (especially with MFG). Most games won't get anywhere close to the 240Hz limit of the monitor at 4K when rendering at native resolution, which is where framegen and MFG can be useful.

The new GPU test suite consists of 22 games. We're still looking at some potential changes and additions, but this is where we're at for now. Six of the games in our standard test suite have RT support enabled. The remaining 16 games are run in pure rasterization mode. However, with cards like the RTX 5080 and 5090, we'll be looking at supplemental testing using some of the most demanding games that feature full RT / "path tracing" support. (That testing is still ongoing, but check page six.)

All 22 games are tested without any upscaling or frame generation as our baseline. Again, we plan to do additional investigations into things like DLSS 2/3/4 and framegen/MFG, but that's separate from the primary testing. There are noticeable differences between the image quality of DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, as well as differences in how much they can affect performance, which is why we're not using any of them for our baseline measurements.

All games are tested using 1080p 'medium' settings (the specifics vary by game and are noted in the chart headers), along with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K 'ultra' settings. This provides a good overview of performance in a variety of situations. Depending on the GPU, some of those settings don't make as much sense as others, but seeing how fast cards like the RTX 5080 run at 1080p can be enlightening. (As with our 5090 initial testing, 1080p performance seems to hit bottlenecks on the 5080 that are lower than what we see on the previous generation, likely due to driver immaturity for the new Blackwell architecture.)

Our OS has all the latest updates applied. We're also using Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on page eight.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we run some professional and AI application tests. We've previously tested Stable Diffusion, using various custom scripts, but to level the playing field and hopefully make things a bit more manageable (AI is a fast moving field!), we're turning to standardized benchmarks. We use Procyon and run the AI Vision test as well as the Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL tests; MLPerf Client 0.5 preview for AI text generation; SPECworkstation 4.0 for Handbrake transcoding, AI inference, and professional applications; 3DMark DXR Feature Test to check raw hardware RT performance; and finally Blender Benchmark 4.3.0 for professional 3D rendering. At present, Procyon does not work on the Blackwell GPUs due to an older and apparently outdated TensorRT framework.

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