Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 FE Review: More Performance, Same Price

The GeForce RTX 5080 series gaming graphics cards go on sale today, and simultaneously, we can now publish performance test results. The biggest improvement over the last generation is an interesting performance boost in the most demanding titles at 4K and support for new standards and technologies. The edge is especially gained in demanding ray tracing scenarios, and vice versa.

While the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 can be talked about as at least semi-professional cards due to their price and memory capacity, the cheaper RTX 5080 is already a model aimed primarily at demanding gamers. It mainly targets 4K gaming, but with 16 GB of memory it’s also quite usable for application use and working with AI models. Let’s start by recapping the RTX 5080’s specs.


	GeForce RTX 5090	GeForce RTX 5080	GeForce RTX 4090	GeForce RTX 4080 Super	GeForce RTX 4080
Shader cores	Blackwell	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace
Nvidia CUDA cores (SP)	21760	10752	16384	10240	9728
Texture Mapping Units	680	336	512	320	304
Render Output Units	176	128	176	112	112
RT cores	318 TFLOPS	171 TFLOPS	191 TFLOPS	121 TFLOPS	113 TFLOPS
Tensor Cores	3352 AI TOPS	1801 AI TOPS	1321 AI TOPS	836 AI TOPS	780 AI TOPS
Boost Clock	2.41 GHz	2.62 GHz	2.52 GHz	2.55 GHz	2.51 GHz
Base Clock	2.10 GHz	2.30 GHz	2.23 GHz	2.29 GHz	2.21 GHz
Memory	32 GB GDDR7	16 GB DDR7	24 GB GDDR6X	16 GB GDDR6X	16 GB GDDR6X
Memory Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1792 GB/s	960 GB/s	1008 GB/s	736 GB/s	717 GB/s
Max. resolution	4K at 480Hz or 8K at 120Hz with DSC	4K at 480Hz or 8K at 120Hz with DSC	4K at 240 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz with DSC, HDR	4K at 240 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz with DSC, HDR	4K at 240 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz with DSC, HDR
Standard Display Connectors	3× DisplayPort, 1× HDMI	3× DisplayPort, 1× HDMI	3× DisplayPort, 1× HDMI	3× DisplayPort, 1× HDMI	3× DisplayPort, 1× HDMI
PCI Express	Gen 5	Gen 5	Gen 4	Gen 4	Gen 4
Nvidia Encoder	3× 9th gen	2× 9th gen	2× 8th gen	2× 8th gen	2× 8th gen
Nvidia Decoder	2× 6th gen	2× 6th gen	1× 5th gen	1× 5th gen	1× 5th gen
length	304 mm	304 mm	304 mm	304 mm	304 mm
width	137 mm	137 mm	137 mm	137 mm	137 mm
height	2-slot	2-slot	3-slot	3-slot	3-slot
Total Graphics Power	575 W	360 W	450 W	320 W	320 W
Supplementary Power Connectores	4× 8pin PCIe (adapter) or 1× 600 W PCIe Gen 5	3× 8pin PCIe (adapter) or 1× 450 W PCIe Gen 5	3× 8pin PCIe (adapter) or 1× 450 W PCIe Gen 5	3× 8pin PCIe (adapter) or 1× 450 W PCIe Gen 5	3× 8pin PCIe (adapter) or 1× 450 W PCIe Gen 5

A detailed description of the new technologies that the new graphics cards and architecture bring is provided by Jan Olšan in the article Blackwell: GeForce RTX 5000 architecture and innovations. It presents the individual chips that Nvidia uses in the new graphics cards, as well as the new DDR7 memory, changes to the cache, compute units in the GPU, changes to the shaders and Tensor Cores, and improved compute units for ray tracing. Support for the new standards DisplayPort 2.1b and PCIe 5.0 has been added to the cards as well.

With the new generation of cards, the capabilities of DLSS are also advancing, which can now use Multi Frame Generation to generate up to three intermediate frames, and new is also the second generation of Nvidia Reflex with Frame Warp technology, which can adjust the movement of objects and the camera in rendered frames based on the most recent information from peripherals, which it receives only during or after the frame is rendered. Everything is described in more detail in the mentioned article.

The unboxing of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition is already quite different from what we’re used to. The box is in natural colors. In order to get inside, you have to tear off the tape around the perimeter. When you open the lid and flip up the sides, a smaller sturdy stylized card-shaped package also made of corrugated cardboard peeks out at you. Underneath is an even smaller box with a power adapter.

Inside the package is the card itself. In the small box you will find a brief installation guide and a power octopus with three tentacles of eight pins.

While the RTX 4080 Founders Edition was a massive three-slot brick, the RTX 5080 FE looks like an ordinary card again. It’s wider, it’s longer, but otherwise it has the compact design that was previously common with reference cards and fits easily into regular sized cases.

The design is no different from the higher performance RTX 5090. The only thing different is the colour shade of the frame part, it is brighter on the RTX 5080.