Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 FE Review: More Performance, Same Price

RTX 5080 Founders Edition: introduction and parameters

The GeForce RTX 5080 series gaming graphics cards go on sale today, and simultaneously, we can now publish performance test results. The biggest improvement over the last generation is an interesting performance boost in the most demanding titles at 4K and support for new standards and technologies. The edge is especially gained in demanding ray tracing scenarios, and vice versa.

While the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 can be talked about as at least semi-professional cards due to their price and memory capacity, the cheaper RTX 5080 is already a model aimed primarily at demanding gamers. It mainly targets 4K gaming, but with 16 GB of memory it’s also quite usable for application use and working with AI models. Let’s start by recapping the RTX 5080’s specs.

 
A detailed description of the new technologies that the new graphics cards and architecture bring is provided by Jan Olšan in the article Blackwell: GeForce RTX 5000 architecture and innovations. It presents the individual chips that Nvidia uses in the new graphics cards, as well as the new DDR7 memory, changes to the cache, compute units in the GPU, changes to the shaders and Tensor Cores, and improved compute units for ray tracing. Support for the new standards DisplayPort 2.1b and PCIe 5.0 has been added to the cards as well.

With the new generation of cards, the capabilities of DLSS are also advancing, which can now use Multi Frame Generation to generate up to three intermediate frames, and new is also the second generation of Nvidia Reflex with Frame Warp technology, which can adjust the movement of objects and the camera in rendered frames based on the most recent information from peripherals, which it receives only during or after the frame is rendered. Everything is described in more detail in the mentioned article.

The unboxing of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition is already quite different from what we’re used to. The box is in natural colors. In order to get inside, you have to tear off the tape around the perimeter. When you open the lid and flip up the sides, a smaller sturdy stylized card-shaped package also made of corrugated cardboard peeks out at you. Underneath is an even smaller box with a power adapter.

Inside the package is the card itself. In the small box you will find a brief installation guide and a power octopus with three tentacles of eight pins.

While the RTX 4080 Founders Edition was a massive three-slot brick, the RTX 5080 FE looks like an ordinary card again. It’s wider, it’s longer, but otherwise it has the compact design that was previously common with reference cards and fits easily into regular sized cases.

The design is no different from the higher performance RTX 5090. The only thing different is the colour shade of the frame part, it is brighter on the RTX 5080.

In terms of diagnostic applications, we still won’t see much more than when the RTX 5090 was launched.

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• Contents
• RTX 5080 Founders Edition: introduction and parameters
• Card design, connectors
• Test build
• Black Myth: Wukong, Metro Exodus EE, Satisfactory
• Cyberpunk 2077
• F1 24
• UL 3Dmark, Procyon AI, Blender benchmark
• Operating characteristics – F1 24
• Closing summary

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