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

Wholly dependent on multi-frame generation to appear faster.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition card photos and unboxing
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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Nvidia RTX 5080: Power, Clocks, Temps, and Noise

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

All our gaming tests are conducted using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, which allows us to capture total graphics card power, GPU clocks, GPU temperatures, and some other data as we run each gaming benchmark. We have separate 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for each area.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The RTX 5080 Founders Edition comes in far below it's rated 360W TGP (Total Graphics Power), even at 4K ultra. It averaged 297W compared to 299W on the 4080 Super, and uses even less power at 1440p and 1080p. Check the table at the bottom of this page for the individual game power results.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Clock speeds among the different GPUs and architectures aren't particularly important, but it's interesting to see where things land. Nvidia lists an official boost clock of 2617 MHz on the 5080, compared to 2550 MHz on the 4080 Super and 2520 MHz on the 4090. In practice, both the 4080 Super and 4090 averaged higher clocks across our test suite, though some of that is likely due to the already-mentioned immaturity of the Blackwell drivers.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Like the clock speeds, comparing GPU temperatures without considering other aspects of the cards doesn't make much sense. One card could run its fans at higher RPMs, generating more noise while being "cooler." So these graphs should be used alongside the noise and performance results.

The RTX 5090 FE definitely runs warmer than the RTX 4090 FE, and the same goes for the 5080 FE and 4080 Super FE at 4K ultra. However, the 5080 cooler, combined with other architectural differences, ends up yielding lower temps at 1440p and 1080p.

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the right fan for two fans. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources, like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 31–32 dB(A).

[Charts to come, sorry! Still testing...]

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Here's the full table of testing results, with FPS/$ calculated using MSRP for the Nvidia cards, and street pricing of $864.99 on the 7900 XTX. Latency results are included for some of the games as well, and you can see the game-by-game power figures.

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Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

224 Comments Comment from the forums
  • cknobman
    Pretty darn dissapointing.
    Sit back and let the impatient suckers get fleeced.
    I'll happily wait for March and see if AMD can offer something worth buying at $500.
    Reply
  • LolaGT
    Wow, I am a little gob smacked that nvidia is selling that with a straight face.
    Reply
  • Gururu
    It's so cheap though, $1000 less than the 5090.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Not good. Can't imagine even Nvidia engineers are proud of this product.
    Reply
  • King_V
    I initially looked at the TDP numbers, and thought: a new architecture, slightly more than 10% extra power draw for slightly less than 10% extra performance, on average, for gaming.

    But, that it actually doesn't exceed the power consumption during use of the 4080 Super is nice to see.

    Still, yeah, if you're in the market for a GPU with this performance, and if the price is the same, the 5080 is the way to go.

    But, I feel like the odds are that, at least for a few months, the 5080 will cost more, and the 4080 Super prices MIGHT come down a little with the release of the 5000 series. If so, that situation could make the 5080 a hard sell.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Gururu said:
    It's so cheap though, $1000 less than the 5090.
    5090 is more than 50% faster than 5080 which is ridiculous. There's something to be said for trying to upsell, but that's way too big a gap in performance and cost between the 5080 and 5090. Also sounds like there are issues with volume production as well. Getting people to move up doesn't work if you don't have product to sell them. If you're in the market for a 5080, wait for the refresh. Will likely have more VRAM and will hopefully gain some meaningful ground in performance.
    Reply
  • TCA_ChinChin
    How is "second fastest GPU" a positive? Its not even true, the 4090 is the second fastest GPU. This is the worst 80 series release by Nvidia for a while now. Im pretty sure the last 4-5 generations of 80 series cards have outperformed the previous generation flagship (except the 2080 vs 1080ti which was also a quite disappointing generation).
    Reply
  • Elusive Ruse
    Thank you @JarredWaltonGPU for the detailed review and pointing out the flaws of this underwhelming product. The 80 class is officially dead? I wish you had the time to include the 3090 as well so we could see how 4080 performed against it and in turn highlight the fact that the 5080 doesn’t even come close to the 4090.

    I was in the market for a 5080 but my excitement died down gradually with the leaks about its specs over the past few months and with the reviews out I’m definitely not planning to throw €1200+ at it.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    Elusive Ruse said:
    I wish you had the time to include the 3090 as well so we could see how 4080 performed against it and in turn highlight the fact that the 5080 doesn’t even come close to the 4090.
    5080 is 50% faster than the 3090 at 4k. So a decent upgrade for 3090 users for less money than they spent on their 3090 though there is a memory downgrade. Still would recommend waiting for the refresh.
    Reply
  • I'm getting the impression that the reason behind 5080 being so disappointing, is Nvidia trying to funnel consumers into buying the extremely inflated 5090.
    Reply