Nvidia RTX 5080 Review: Efficiency Gains, Performance Letdown

1. Introduction2. Meet the RTX 5080 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. Alan Wake II5. Black Myth: Wukong6. Cyberpunk 20777. Final Fantasy XVI8. Forza Horizon 59. Ghost of Tsushima10. Horizon Forbidden West11. The Last of Us Part 112. A Plague Tale: Requiem13. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 214. Starfield15. Total War: Warhammer III16. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)17. Cost Per Frame Analysis18. Ray Tracing: Alan Wake II19. Ray Tracing: Black Myth: Wukong20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: F1 2422. Ray Tracing: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart23. Ray Tracing: Returnal24. Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider25. Ray Tracing: Star Wars Outlaws26. Ray Tracing Performance Summary27. DLSS Testing28. AI & Productivity Benchmarks29. Clock Speed30. GPU Temperatures31. Acoustics32. Power Draw: 1080p33. Power Draw: 1440p34. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)35. Performance per Watt: 1080p36. Performance per Watt: 1440p37. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)38. Total System Power Draw39. Closing Thoughts40. View All Pages

Here we present a range of AI and productivity benchmarks, designed to offer insight into the sort of workloads that might be undertaken by someone purchasing this calibre of GPU.

Starting with our Stable Diffusion XL FP16 image generation test, here the RTX 5080 delivers just a modest 6% gain over the RTX 4080 Super, while it's 24% slower than the RTX 4090.

There are more positives to take from the AI Text Generation test however, particularly looking at performance from the two Llama models – in both cases, the RTX 5080 delivers gains of over 20% compared to the RTX 4080 Super.

Geekbench AI Pro's performance is more mixed, with the single precision results slightly slower than even the RX 7900 XTX, but the half precision results are faster than even the RTX 4090 and mark a gain of 14% over the RTX 4080 Super.

Moving onto Blender performance, we're once again look at just a 6% gain over the RTX 4080 Super.

V-Ray GPU Benchmark is more impressive, however, when using the RTX path. Here, the RTX 5080 is 23% faster than the 4080 Super and 16% slower than the 4090.

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