Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition review

pcgamer.com:

The Nvidia RTX 5080 is like the difficult second album for the RTX Blackwell GPU band. It's a card that comes in at fully half the price of its RTX 5090 sibling, and presents us with a graphics card which—even more so than the previous card—reminds me very much of its erstwhile last-gen stablemate, the RTX 4080 Super.

I don't want to have to refer to this second spin of the Blackwell wheel as an ostensible RTX 4080 Ti Super, but there are a ton of similarities between the Ada refresh and this new GB203-powered RTX 5080. And if there was ever a reason for Nvidia not enabling its new Multi Frame Generation technology on RTX 40-series cards, this is the physical embodiment of it. Right now, it's kinda all the RTX 5080's got going for it.

But while not a lot has changed between the two cards, that includes the price. We are talking about a GPU which costs half the price of the most powerful consumer graphics card on the planet, and yet notably performs better than half as well. Of course, you're always going to pay more for that last little bit of ultra-enthusiast power to step up, I just kinda mean you shouldn't feel too bad if you can only drop $1,000 on a new GPU and not the $2,000+ of the RTX 5090. Poor lamb.

And, of course, there's AI. But actually useful AI, which makes our games run faster through the magic of AI models and yet still look damn good in the process. Yes, DLSS 4 with its Multi Frame Generation feature is the sign the RTX 5080 will continually tap whenever anyone brings up its striking resemblance to an RTX 4080 Super.

I don't hate the RTX 5080, it just very much feels like this is an Ada GPU with some tweaked Tensor and RT Cores, an enhanced bit of flip metering silicon in the display engine, and an AI management processor queuing up all the new AI-ness of this neural rendering future of ours. Which we're going to have to wait and see what those end-user benefits actually end up looking like.

I mean, you wait two and a bit years for a new graphics