The RTX 5080 is a great GPU that you probably can’t get right now
It’s a strange time to be reviewing an Nvidia graphics card. The company sent me a GeForce RTX 5080 a month and a half ago, and in that time, I’ve played a lot of games and watched a lot of GPU benchmark comparison videos. But also in that time, Nvidia’s longtime competitor AMD (which has […]
It’s a strange time to be reviewing an Nvidia graphics card. The company sent me a GeForce RTX 5080 a month and a half ago, and in that time, I’ve played a lot of games and watched a lot of GPU benchmark comparison videos. But also in that time, Nvidia’s longtime competitor AMD (which has historically been the underdog of the two) released its new line of cards, including the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is shockingly comparable to the RTX 5080 while being significantly cheaper (the 9070 XT retails for $599, while the RTX 5080 costs $999). I figured, maybe by the time I post something, you’d be able to buy either GPU.
Here’s the thing, though — you can’t. Almost as soon as Nvidia’s new cards hit the market in February, they sold out in less than an hour. The AMD cards are also in extraordinarily short supply. More troubling, both the Nvidia and AMD GPUs have ended up selling for significantly more than their retail price, either because of enterprising resellers, or because retailers can and do take advantage of the fact that people are always willing to pay quite a bit more for these cards than the list prices. But even if you were willing to pay several thousand dollars for one of these cards, you still might not be able to get one for months — or longer, it’s hard to say right now. Not that many of these cards exist in the world at this time, seemingly. [Ed note: This is not a new problem.]
I don’t have a 9070 XT to which I can compare the RTX 5080, and if you’re reading this and you care about that comparison, you’ve probably already decided which one you prefer and what you hope to get. You might be the kind of person who has also been watching comparative benchmark videos and is willing to wait however long it takes to purchase the best-performing card on the market.
Or you might be somebody more like me, who purchases what’s available and affordable when I’m in a position to upgrade. I actually bought an RTX 4070 Ti Super last fall with my own money. At that time, rumors suggested that Nvidia would release new cards in early 2025, but I was worried about President Trump’s impending tariffs, and I guessed that the 50-series cards wouldn’t actually be available to purchase for a long time after their debut anyway. It’s why I actually bought all of the parts for a brand-new PC build alongside my new GPU. (Also, at that time I didn’t know Nvidia was going to send me an RTX 5080 to review. One cannot and should not count on such things, even in our line of work.) This PC, for readers’ reference, contains an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz 8-core processor, a Gigabyte X670 AORUS Elite AX motherboard, 64 GB of RAM, and a 1600 W power supply. I have two 1440p monitors and, unfortunately for testing purposes, no 4K displays.
In addition to feeling desperate to upgrade my PC before Trump took office, lest I make an already expensive upgrade even pricier, I just wanted to play STALKER 2, which didn’t run at all on my previous PC (the one that contained the RTX 3070 I reviewed in 2020, a card that’s slightly below the recommended STALKER 2 system requirements). I’m not saying that STALKER 2 ran poorly on my previous machine. It did not run at all. It wouldn’t even load. Now, the PC version of STALKER 2 wasn’t exactly optimized for success at launch, but I kept on trying after multiple updates, and it didn’t go well. It seemed like an ill portent. Plus, the RTX 3070 was by far the newest component in my PC at that time.
I was planning to circle back to the RTX 3070 as my comparison point for this RTX 5080 review because I figured the differences between it and my RTX 4070 Ti Super would be somewhat negligible, or at least, not very exciting to write about. Instead, I’ve ended up realizing that my RTX 4070 Ti Super — by far the most expensive item in my new PC build — was not actually that great.
I hate to even admit this because I’m still kind of pissed off about it, but here we go. I had actually realized this problem long before the RTX 5080 arrived on my doorstep. Most games looked good on my new PC build, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — and let me use a technical term here — looked like dogshit. I could have, and would have, spent more time trying to figure out where the bottlenecking was happening, or why the frame rate in the game would plummet any time I tried to actually turn up the graphics settings at all to take some nice screenshots of what should have been a very pretty video game. Even on normal settings, it still tended to look shimmery and grainy and just plain wrong.
I’m now gratified to learn that I’m not alone in this experience. Googling “RTX 4070 Ti Super Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks bad” will yield tons of different forum threads on Steam, Reddit, and elsewhere from people having the same problems that I ran into. After a lot of tweaking with settings, I managed to find a sweet spot where the game looked pretty good and the frame rate wasn’t suffering, but I felt confused and disappointed that it didn’t look way better — and that this much effort was required to feel content with the results. After all, I had just upgraded my entire PC, and Great Circle was the first major AAA, graphically intensive game that was released after my big upgrade. It felt bad.
I now feel extremely spoiled by how good my games have looked and performed in 1440p with the RTX 5080. As soon as I plugged it in and installed the new Nvidia drivers, Great Circle looked incredible, no tweaks required. With every setting maxed out, I was still able to average 120-125 frames per second in the game, even in wide-open areas with lots of moving assets on screen (with Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation technology on the 4x setting). STALKER 2 fared even better, averaging 160 fps on all “Epic” settings and only dropping to 120 fps when I ran into those massive anomaly areas with tons of stuff floating around in the air.
Perhaps the most satisfying point of comparison for me was Cyberpunk 2077. This is a game with a lot of shiny, reflective surfaces, and I had a blast taking pictures of them all. I compared them to some of my old screenshots when I first played the game, on my previous PC with the RTX 3070 (which was a brand-new card for me when that game was first released), and it’s fun to see the improvements. Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten a big makeover (including DLSS 4 support and path tracing) since it was first released, and now, my PC has, too, and I get to reap the benefits.
All of this said, would I have attempted to purchase an RTX 5080 on my own, had I not been sent one by Nvidia last month? I actually think I might have, but not for a long time — probably a year from now, or longer, once the card actually becomes widely available and affordable. By that point, my personal frustrations with the RTX 4070 Ti Super — itself not a particularly big jump in power compared to the RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4070 Super (yes, those are actually two other cards with extremely similar names) — might have motivated me to resell and trade up my GPU. Or perhaps in the intervening time, I would have troubleshooted whatever weird, unlikely bottleneck was happening with my GPU on Great Circle. I have the personal privilege, currently, of not having to figure that out anymore, because I have an RTX 5080 that makes everything look fantastic right out of the box with no work on my part at all. Even if I decide to upgrade to 4K monitors down the line, I’m not too concerned about whether the RTX 5080 can keep up.
For a regular person who’s looking to purchase a GPU right this second, I don’t know that I can recommend the RTX 5080 because you literally can’t buy it right now. I mean, you can certainly try, and if you’re as anxious about impending tariffs as I am, then maybe you should, despite the resale markup you’ll probably face. Even Nvidia’s 40-series cards are currently selling for hefty price tags, and it might be a while before even those cards get cheaper. They probably won’t until the 50-series cards are more widely available, assuming that ever happens.
This is part of why the entire competition between the Nvidia RTX 5080 and AMD RX 9070 XT is a theoretical one, at least for the moment. Unless you’re willing to pay top dollar for a wallet-gouging resale on the exact new card you want, you’re probably going to do what I did last fall, which was to purchase a decently new card that happened to be available at a bearable price during the time period that I was making said purchase. If that somehow ends up being an RTX 5080, I can promise you it’ll make AAA games look fantastic for the next couple of years. Also, I hope you’re surviving whatever is happening to you in the far future where that RTX 5080 was available to buy at a bearable price.
