Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition Review

Conclusion

Conclusion

As we said in our introduction, the Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition is almost famous before it’s appeared. Such is the incredible reputation of its similarly numbered forebears, the expectation is massive. The GTX 280 was launched 17 years ago, and apart from a couple of notable missteps – the red hot GTX 480 for example – they’ve all been stellar. It’s not a coincidence that when Nvidia introduced the RTX series of cards the top model was a RTX 2080 Ti. The name has cachet.

Clearly the RTX 5090 follows the recent trend where the 90 card is the flagship, money-no-object option. The x080 cards are for those with deep pockets, but not unlimited ones. Or perhaps those for whom gaming is your primary thing and so spending a little more is worthwhile. That’s where the Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition comes in. We’ve yet to see performance figures for the guaranteed massive selling RTX 5070 and RTX 5070Ti models. That leaves us with either seeing how close the Nvidia RTX 5080 can get to the big RTX 5090, or how much better than the Ada Lovelace cards it is.

If the RTX 5090 was jaw-dropping, the RTX 5080 continues that good work. The next generation of cores which festoon the tiny PCB really put the work in to give you smooth performance. We know that the big ticket item is multi-frame generation, but even in pure rasterised benchmarks the Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition proves a big upgrade on the previous model. If you’re just after the latest and greatest at an enthusiast price point, you can almost stop reading here.

Multi-Frame Generation

There is no getting away from the potential of the multi-frame generation technology though. It’s incredible how you just gain frames without a noticeable drop in image quality. Sure if you took screenshots and put them side by side you might, with a magnifying glass, spot something. We couldn’t. In fact if, like the optician, we were asked to pick between the two in motion, rasterised/DLSS and the multi-frame generation, we think the MFG looks sharper and crisper. Like a factory-backed version of Reshade built into your drivers. It’s stunning. Plus, as you can see from our graphs, the results are clear.

The Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition is a gorgeous looking card, with svelte proportions and cool temperatures. It’s a card that’s much kinder on your energy bill than its big brother, but can still put out stunning frames per second. What a weapon.

For those of you who remember, the OG RTX 4080 was 1200, so the £979 of the RTX 5080 is a bargain. Half the RTX 5090 price, not half the performance.

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