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Nvidia RTX 5080 Founder's Edition

The best card you can afford.

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The RTX 5080 card from Nvidia costs about half that of its big brother, the RTX 5090, and is probably the biggest and best card mainstream gamers will be able to afford this generation, as it's retailing at around $999/£979. Or to put it another way: ordinary gamers probably won't spend £1,939/$1,999 on a graphics card; only enthusiasts who want to game in 4K on an OLED screen, and who have too much money, will.

But they also get to enjoy 10,572 CUDA Cores, new Tensor and Ray-Tracing Cores, total AI integration throughout the card, and not least DLSS 4 and Reflex 2, a new upscaling model and Multi Frame Generation that can conjure up not one, but three frames every time you render an image the old fashioned way. Oh yeah, and 16 GB of seventh generation VRAM.

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The card is slightly smaller than the RTX 5090, it has that lovely angled power connector and not least an adapter with tidy, individual leads that are quite bendable. There are only three of them, by the way, because this card only needs 315.68 Watts in operation. It's still a hefty beast with a dual blow-through design and a clean, rounded industrial appearance that looks more like something you'd find in a CAD server farm than in a gaming PC.

It's also one of the quietest cards we've ever measured at 38.5 dB and a minimum temperature of 32 degrees Celsius, but it can reach as high as 76 degrees Celsius.

Nvidia RTX 5080 Founder's Edition

The benchmarks are below, and the big question for many is whether it's worth the switch. Unfortunately, it depends on the scenario, because some games run great, over 60 FPS native even in 4K, while others require artificial aids such as DLSS and maybe even Multi Frame Generation to reach the same levels. It's not the card that's the problem, but the developers, in my opinion, because overall performance jumps a lot, depending on what you play. Generally, the difference is bigger in newer and more demanding games when more advanced Ray-Tracing or similar is used. A 30% difference was not unusual in several titles, while others had a non-existent difference.

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But let's get back to what the people want: benchmarks. The driver used wasn't without its issues and Windows chose to make up some numbers during the testing period, so expect higher numbers when testing at home. It's based on an X870 platform with a Ryzen 7 9800 X3D CPU, and overall the numbers were slightly higher than the other RTX 5090 card we've tried at the same time of this review. However, it fluctuates wildly and it doesn't matter if it's rasterization, with or without Ray-Tracing, DLSS, and so on.

3D Benchmark


  • Time Spy: 26733

  • Speed Way: 8382

  • Port Royal: 21560

  • Steel Nomad: 7808

V Ray 6


  • RTX: 9358

Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark - Cinematic, 4K DLSS


  • Non-Frame Generation: 19

  • Frame Generation: 34

Total War: Warhammer III


  • 1080p: 267.00

  • 1440p: 184.60

  • 4K: 98.50

It's one thing that Total War: Warhammer III still requires expensive hardware to run in 4K, but it's even worse for those who want all the good stuff in Black Myth: Wukong. The benchmark tool and real gaming experience shouldn't be quite the same though, as the benchmark tool is worst-case scenario.

Red Dead Redemption 2


  • 1080p: 179.41

  • 1440p: 151.50

  • 4K: 108.43

Cyberpunk 2077

Ultra settings, Ray-Tracing Ultra/ DLSS 4 + Multi Frame Generation:


  • 1080p: 130.82/399.82

  • 1440p: 98.44/291.51

  • 4K: 59.79/178.11

In case anyone is in doubt, you can't really run anything native in this game as 18.79 was what I got with everything turned off and no artificial aids. Metro Exodus was its usual unstable self and didn't bother to run on our testing day. In a week it will probably work without any problems. Despite DLSS 3 making a significant difference here, it's still crazy that it can't crawl above 60 FPS unassisted so long after release.

Star Wars Outlaws

4K Ultra, with and without DLSS:


  • 4K: 38.00

  • 4K + DLSS: 114.00

This is a strange game that on the one hand shows how well upscaling with the Transformer model and Multi Frame Generation works, and on the other hand is also just horribly ported to PC. 38 FPS with a graphics card that is the second most expensive this generation is simply unacceptable. In the meantime, we have:

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

4K Ultra, with full Ray-Tracing:


  • 4K: 49.00

  • 4K + DLSS + Multi Frame Generation: 135.00

Successful integration, but again also a grotesque example that you can't get 60 FPS natively with a graphics card costing almost £1,000

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

With and without DLSS:


  • 1080p: 210.00/390.00

  • 1440p: 172.00/311.00

  • 4K: 114.00/207.00

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II

4K with and without DLSS:


  • 4K: 64.00/100.00

Warhammer 40,0000: Darktide

4K with and without DLSS and with Frame Generation switched on:


  • 4K: 97.00/117.20

Nvidia RTX 5080 Founder's Edition

Right here, the Founder's Edition performs significantly better than the other card we tested during the same period. I can't explain why, but when updated drivers are released, the difference may be slightly smaller.

There is also a real possibility for overclocking, as even with an adapter you have about 100 Watts to play with, although it's unlikely to make sense for many. But the price is lower, the performance is 20-30% better than its predecessor in many cases, but again, sometimes the difference when compared to an RTX 4080 is also quite minimal. In other words, it depends on the games you like. That said, for anyone with anything less than an RTX 4080, it would be a very obvious upgrade, as it's quiet, it uses a more moderate amount of power, and if you're the type of person who likes to spend £1,000 on a graphics card, then yes... it's recommended.

10 Gamereactor UK
10 / 10
overall score
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