Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition Review
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Introduction
Numbers are funny things. Theoretically they are cold and impersonal. Words can have a meaning because they tend to be visual. Numbers though, they’re just numbers. As we all know though, that’s not strictly true. Most of us have a lucky number. All of us have a birthday, the numbers of which are special to us. Computer hardware numbers generally remind us of our formative years, or something which touched our soul.
I started on the 80286SX-12. 286 means a lot to me. Naturally that means I’m old so my first 3D GPU being a Riva TNT is unlikely to be referenced in modern hardware. Although I’ve still got it in my loft. For many people though their first real big graphics cards were part of the Nvidia 80 range. From the toaster that was the GTX 480, through the blazing speed of the famous GTX 980 Ti. The current thinking began too with an 80, the RTX 2080 Ti. A card which brought real time ray-tracing to the desktop. At the risk of once again giving away my age, rendering a single Utah Teapot on a chequered background was the work of an afternoon. Now we have real-time ray tracing. Crazy times.
If you saw our coverage of the RTX 5090 then you’ll know the latest generation of Nvidia’s graphics behemoth continues to smash the competition. It is, nonetheless, a card for the rich. If you’re an enthusiast with an upper spending limit, albeit a big one, the Nvidia RTX 5080 is probably the attractive proposition. Especially because the 80 cards have a place in all our hearts. Let’s see how this one stacks up.
Technical Specifications
A comparison of cards if you like such things. The important thing to note is that the difference between the generations of cores is worth significantly more than the number of them. 84 4th Gen RT Cores are multitudes more capable than 84 2nd Gen RT Cores. The Nvidia RTX 5080 certainly has a lot of power on paper.