Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Two-minute review

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti definitely had a high expectation bar to clear after the mixed reception of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 last month, especially from enthusiasts.

And while there are things I fault the RTX 5070 Ti for, there's no doubt that it has taken the lead as the best graphics card most people can buy right now—assuming that scalpers don't get there first.

The RTX 5070 Ti starts at $749 / £729 (about AU$1,050), making its MSRP a good bit cheaper than its predecessor was at launch, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, as well as the buffed-up Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super.

The fact that the RTX 5070 Ti beats both of those cards handily in terms of performance would normally be enough to get it high marks, but this card even ekes out a win over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super, shooting it nearly to the top of the best Nvidia graphics card lists.

As one of the best 4K graphics cards I've ever tested, it isn't without faults, but we're really only talking about the fact that Nvidia isn't releasing a Founders Edition card for this one, and that's unfortunate for a couple of reasons.

For one, and probably most importantly, without a Founders Edition card from Nvidia guaranteed to sell for MSRP directly from Nvidia's website, the MSRP price for this card is just a suggestion. And without an MSRP card from Nvidia keeping AIB partners onside, it'll be hard finding a card at Nvidia's $749 price tag, reducing its value proposition.

Also, because there's no Founders Edition, Nvidia's dual pass-through design to keep the card cool will pass the 5070 Ti by. If you were hoping that the RTX 5070 Ti might be SFF-friendly, I simply don't see how the RTX 5070 Ti fits into that unless you stretch the meaning of small form factor until it hurts.

Those aren't small quibbles, but given everything else the RTX 5070 Ti brings to the table, they do seem like I'm stretching myself a bit to find something bad to say about this card for balance.

For the vast majority of buyers out there looking for outstanding 4K performance at a relatively approachable MSRP, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the card you're going to want to buy.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Price & availability

• How much is it? MSRP is $749/£729 (about AU$1,050), but with no Founders Edition, third-party cards will likely be higher
• When can you get it? The RTX 5070 Ti goes on sale February 20, 2025
• Where is it available? The RTX 5070 Ti will be available in the US, UK, and Australia at launch

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti goes on sale on February 20, 2025, starting at $749/£729 (about AU$1,050) in the US, UK, and Australia, respectively.

Unlike the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, there is no Founders Edition card for the RTX 5070 Ti, so there are no versions of this card that will be guaranteed to sell at this MSRP price, which does complicate things given the current scalping frenzy we've seen for the previous RTX 50 series cards.

While stock of the Founders Edition RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 might be hard to find even from Nvidia, there is a place, at least, where you could theoretically buy those cards at MSRP. No such luck with the RTX 5070 Ti, which is a shame.

The 5070 Ti MSRP does at least come in under the launch MSRPs of both the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super, neither of which had Founders Edition cards, so stock and pricing will hopefully stay within the bounds of where those cards have been selling for.

The 5070 Ti's MSRP puts it on the lower-end of the enthusiast-class, and while we haven't seen the price for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT yet, it's unlikely that AMD's competing RDNA 4 GPU will sell for much less than the RTX 5070 Ti, but if you're not in a hurry, it might be worth waiting a month or two to see what AMD has to offer in this range before deciding which is the better buy.

• Value: 4 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Specs

• GDDR7 VRAM and PCIe 5.0
• Slight bump in power consumption
• More memory than its direct predecessor

Like the rest of the Nvidia Blackwell GPU lineup, there are some notable advances with the RTX 5070 Ti over its predecessors.

First, the RTX 5070 Ti features faster GDDR7 memory which, in addition to having an additional 4GB VRAM than the RTX 4070 Ti's 12GB, means that the RTX 5070 Ti's larger, faster memory pool can process high resolution texture files faster, making it far more capable at 4K resolutions.

Also of note is its 256-bit memory interface, which is 33.3% larger than the RTX 4070 Ti's, and equal to that of the RTX 4070 Ti Super. 64 extra bits might not seem like a lot, but just like trying to fit a couch through a door, even an extra inch or two of extra space can be the difference between moving the whole thing through at once or having to do it in parts, which translates into additional work on both ends.

There's also the new PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, which speeds up communication between the graphics card, your processor, and your SSD. If you have a PCIe 5.0 capable motherboard, processor, and SSD, just make note of how many PCIe 5.0 lanes you have available.

The RTX 5070 Ti will take up 16 of them, so if you only have 16 lanes available and you have a PCIe 5.0 SSD, the RTX 5070 Ti is going to get those lanes by default, throttling your SSD to PCIe 4.0 speeds. Some motherboards will let you set PCIe 5.0 priority, if you have to make a choice.

The RTX 5070 Ti uses slightly more power than its predecessors, but in my testing it's maximum power draw came in at just under the card's 300W TDP.

As for the GPU inside the RTX 5070 Ti, it's built using TSMC's N4P process node, which is a refinement of the TSMC N4 node used by its predecessors. While not a full generational jump in process tech, the N4P process does offer better efficiency and a slight increase in transistor density.

• Specs & features: 5 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Design & features

• No Nvidia Founders Edition card
• No dual-pass-through cooling (at least for now)

There is no Founders Edition card for the RTX 5070 Ti, so the RTX 5070 Ti you end up with may look radically different than the one I tested for this review, the Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Whatever partner card you choose though, it's likely to be a chonky card given the card's TDP, since 300W of heat needs a lot of cooling. While the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Founders Edition cards featured the innovative dual pass-through design (which dramatically shrank the card's width), it's unlikely you'll find any RTX 5070 Ti cards in the near future that feature this kind of cooling setup, if ever.

With that groundwork laid, you're going to have a lot of options for cooling setups, shroud design, and lighting options, though more feature-rich cards will likely be more expensive, so make sure you consider the added cost when weighing your options.

As for the Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, the sleek shroud of the card lacks the RGB that a lot of gamers like for their builds, but for those of us who are kind of over RGB, the Prime's design is fantastic and easily worked into any typical mid-tower case.

The Prime RTX 5070 Ti features a triple-fan cooling setup, with one of those fans having complete passthrough over the heatsink fins. There's a protective backplate and stainless bracket over the output ports.

The 16-pin power connector rests along the card's backplate, so even if you invested in a 90-degree angled power cable, you'll still be able to use it, assuming your power supply meets the recommended 750W listed on Asus's website. There's a 3-to-1 adapter included with the card, as well, for those who haven't upgraded to an ATX 3.0 PSU yet.

• Design: 4 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti: Performance

• RTX 4080 Super-level performance
• Massive improvement over the RTX 4070 Ti Super
• Added features like DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation

And so we come to the reason we're all here, which is this card's performance.

Given the...passionate...debate over the RTX 5080's underwhelming gen-on-gen uplift, enthusiasts will be very happy with the performance of the RTX 5070 Ti, at least as far as it relates to the last-gen RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super.

Starting with synthetic scores, at 1080p, both the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 5070 Ti are so overpowered that they get close to CPU-locking on 3DMark's 1080p tests, Night Raid and Fire Strike, though the RTX 5070 Ti does come out about 14% ahead. The RTX 5070 Ti begins to pull away at higher resolutions and once you introduce ray tracing into the mix, with roughly 30% better performance at these higher level tests like Solar Bay, Steel Nomad, and Port Royal.

In terms of raw compute performance, the RTX 5070 Ti scores about 25% better in Geekbench 6 than the RTX 4070 Ti and about 20% better than the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

In creative workloads like Blender Benchmark 4.30, the RTX 5070 Ti pulls way ahead of its predecessors, though the 5070 Ti, 4070 Ti Super, and 4070 Ti all pretty much max out what a GPU can add to my Handbrake 1.9 4K to 1080p encoding test, with all three cards cranking out about 220 FPS encoded on average.

Starting with 1440p gaming, the gen-on-gen improvement of the RTX 5070 Ti over the RTX 4070 Ti is a respectable 20%, even without factoring in DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation.

The biggest complaint that some have about MFG is that if the base frame rate isn't high enough, you'll end up with controls that can feel slightly sluggish, even though the visuals you're seeing are much more fluid.

Fortunately, outside of turning ray tracing to its max settings and leaving Nvidia Reflex off, you're not really going to need to worry about that. The RTX 5070 Ti's minimum FPS for all but one of the games I tested at native 1440p with ray tracing all pretty much hit or exceeded 60 FPS, often by a lot.

Only F1 2024 had a lower-than-60 minimum FPS at native 1440p with max ray tracing, and even then, it still managed to stay above 45 fps, which is fast enough that no human would ever notice any input latency in practice. For 1440p gaming, then, there's absolutely no reason not to turn on MFG whenever it is available since it can substantially increase framerates, often doubling or even tripling them in some cases without issue.

For 4K gaming, the RTX 5070 Ti native performance is spectacular, with nearly every title tested hitting 60 FPS or greater on average, with those that fell short only doing so by 4-5 frames.

Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super, the faster memory and expanded 16GB VRAM pool definitely turn up for the RTX 5070 Ti at 4K, delivering about 31% better overall average FPS than the RTX 4070 Ti and about 23% better average FPS than the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

In fact, the average 4K performance for the RTX 5070 Ti pulls up pretty much dead even with the RTX 4080 Super's performance, and about 12% better than the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX at 4K, despite the latter having 8GB more VRAM.

Like every other graphics card besides the RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090, playing at native 4K with ray tracing maxed out is going to kill your FPS. To the 5070 Ti's credit, though, minimum FPS never dropped so low as to turn things into a slideshow, even if the 5070 Ti's 25 FPS minimum in Cyberpunk 2077 was noticeable.

Turning on DLSS in these cases is a must, even if you skip turning on MFG, but the RTX 5070 Ti's balanced upscaled performance is a fantastic experience.

Leave ray tracing turned off (or set to a lower setting), however, and MFG definitely becomes a viable way to max out your 4K monitor's refresh rate for seriously fluid gaming.

Overall then, the RTX 5070 Ti delivers substantial high-resolution gains gen-on-gen, which should make enthusiasts happy, without having to increase its power consumption all that much.

Of all the graphics cards I've tested over the years, and especially over the past six months, the RTX 5070 Ti is pretty much the perfect balance for whatever you need it for, and if you can get it at MSRP or reasonably close to MSRP, it's without a doubt the best value for your money of any of the current crop of enthusiast graphics cards.

• Performance: 5 / 5

Should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti?

Buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti if...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider

How I tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

• I spent about a week with the RTX 5070 Ti
• I used my complete GPU testing suite to analyze the card's performance
• I tested the card in everyday, gaming, creative, and AI workload usage

I spent about a week testing the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, using it mostly for creative work and gaming, including titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Avowed.

I also used my updated suite of benchmarks including industry standards like 3DMark and Geekbench, as well as built-in gaming benchmarks like Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2.

I also test all of the competing cards in a given card's market class using the same test bench setup throughout so I can fully isolate GPU performance across various, repeatable tests. I then take geometric averages of the various test results (which better insulates the average from being skewed by tests with very large test results) to come to comparable scores for different aspects of the card's performance. I give more weight to gaming performance than creative or AI performance, and performance is given the most weight in how final scores are determined, followed closely by value.

I've been testing GPUs, PCs, and laptops for TechRadar for nearly five years now, with more than two dozen graphics card reviews under my belt in the past three years alone. On top of that, I have a Masters degree in Computer Science and have been building PCs and gaming on PCs for most of my life, so I am well qualified to assess the value of a graphics card and whether it's worth your time and money.

• Originally reviewed February 2025

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080: Two-minute review

At first glance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 doesn't seem like that much of an upgrade from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 it is replacing, but that's only part of the story with this graphics card.

Its performance, to be clear, is unquestioningly solid, positioning it as the third-best graphics card on the market right now, by my testing, and its new PCIe 5.0 interface and GDDR7 VRAM further distances it from the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super from the last generation. It also outpaces the best AMD graphics card, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, by a healthy margin, pretty much locking up the premium, enthusiast-grade GPUs in Nvidia's corner for at least another generation.

Most impressively, it does this all for the same price as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX: $999 / £939 / AU$2,019. This is also a rare instance where a graphics card launch price actually recedes from the high watermark set by its predecessor, as the RTX 5080 climbs down from the inflated price of the RTX 4080 when it launched back in 2022 for $1,199 / £1,189 / AU$2,219.

Then, of course, there's the new design of the card, which features a slimmer dual-slot profile, making it easier to fit into your case (even if the card's length remains unchanged). The dual flow-through fan cooling solution does wonders for managing the extra heat generated by the extra 40W TDP, and while the 12VHPWR cable connector is still present, the 3-to-1 8-pin adapter is at least somewhat less ridiculous the RTX 5090's 4-to-1 dongle.

The new card design also repositions the power connector itself to make it less cumbersome to plug a cable into the card, though it does pretty much negate any of the 90-degree angle cables that gained popularity with the high-end RTX 40 series cards.

Finally, everything is built off of TSMC's 4nm N4 process node, making it one of the most cutting-edge GPUs on the market in terms of its architecture. While AMD and Intel will follow suit with their own 4nm GPUs soon (AMD RDNA 4 also uses TSMC's 4nm process node and is due to launch in March), right now, Nvidia is the only game in town for this latest hardware.

None of that would matter though if the card didn't perform, however, but gamers and enthusiasts can rest assured that even without DLSS 4, you're getting a respectable upgrade. It might not have the wow factor of the beefier RTX 5090, but for gaming, creating, and even AI workloads, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is a spectacular balance of performance, price, and innovation that you won't find anywhere else at this level.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080: Price & availability

• How much is it? MSRP is $999 / £939 / AU$2,019
• When can you get it? The RTX 5080 goes on sale January 30, 2025
• Where is it available? The RTX 5080 will be available in the US, UK, and Australia at launch

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 goes on sale on January 30, 2025, starting at $999 / £939 / AU$2,019 for the Founders Edition and select AIB partner cards, while overclocked (OC) and more feature-rich third-party cards will be priced higher.

This puts the Nvidia RTX 5080 about $200 / £200 / AU$200 cheaper than the launch price of the last-gen RTX 4080, while also matching the price of the RTX 4080 Super.

Both of those RTX 40 series GPUs should see some downward price pressure as a result of the RTX 5080 release, which might complicate the value proposition of the RTX 5080 over the other,

The RTX 5080 is also launching at the same MSRP as the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which is AMD's top GPU right now. And with AMD confirming that it does not intend to launch an enthusiast-grade RDNA 4 GPU this generation, the RTX 5080's only real competition is from other Nvidia graphics cards like the RTX 4080 Super or RTX 5090.

This makes the RTX 5080 a great value proposition for those looking to buy a premium 4K graphics card, as its price-to-performance ratio is very strong.

• Value: 4 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080: Specs & features

• GDDR7 VRAM and PCIe 5.0
• Still just 16GB VRAM
• Slightly higher 360W TDP

While the Nvidia RTX 5080 doesn't push the spec envelope quite as far as the RTX 5090 does, its spec sheet is still impressive.

For starters, like the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080 uses the faster, next-gen PCIe 5.0 interface that allows for faster data processing and coordination with the CPU, which translates directly into higher performance.

You also have new GDDR7 VRAM in the RTX 5080, only the second card to have it after the RTX 5090, and it dramatically increases the memory bandwidth and speed of the RTX 5080 compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super. Those latter two cards both use slower GDDR6X memory, so even though all three cards have the same amount of memory (16GB) and memory bus-width (256-bit), the RTX 5080 has a >25% faster effective memory speed of 30Gbps, compared to the 23Gbps of the RTX 4080 Super and the 22.4Gbps on the base RTX 4080.

This is all on top of the Blackwell GPU inside the card, which is built on TSMC's 4nm process, compared to the Lovelace GPUs in the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super, which use TSMC's 5nm process. So even though the transistor count on the RTX 5080 is slightly lower than its predecessor's, the smaller transistors are faster and more efficient.

The RTX 5080 also has a higher SM count, 84, compared to the RTX 4080's 76 and the RTX 4080 Super's 80, meaning the RTX 5080 has the commensurate increase in shader cores, ray tracing cores, and Tensor cores. It also has a slightly faster boost clock (2,617MHz) than its predecessor and the 4080 Super variant.

Finally, there is a slight increase in the card's TDP, 360W compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super's 320W.

• Specs & features: 4.5 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080: Design

• Slimmer dual-slot form factor
• Dual flow-through cooling system

The redesign of the Nvidia RTX 5080 is identical to that of the RTX 5090, featuring the same slimmed-down dual slot profile as Nvidia's flagship card.

If I were to guess, the redesign of the RTX 5080 isn't as essential as it is for the RTX 5090, which needed a way to bring better cooling for the much hotter 575W TDP, and the RTX 5080 (and eventually the RTX 5070) just slotted into this new design by default.

That said, it's still a fantastic change, especially as it makes the RTX 5080 thinner and lighter than its predecessor.

The core of the redesign is the new dual flow-through cooling solution, which uses an innovative three-part PCB inside to open up a gap at the front of the card, allowing a second fan to blow cooler air over the heat sink fins drawing heat away from the GPU.

This means that you don't need as thick of a heat sink to pull away heat, which allows the card itself to get the same thermal performance from a thinner form factor, moving from the triple-slot RTX 4080 design down to a dual-slot RTX 5080. In practice, this also allows for a slight increase in the card's TDP, giving the card a bit of a performance boost as well, just from implementing a dual flow-through design.

Given that fact, I would not be surprised if other card makers follow suit, and we start getting much slimmer graphics cards as a result.

The only other design choice of note is the 90-degree turn of the 16-pin power port, which should make it easier to plug the 12VHPWR connector into the card. The RTX 4080 didn't suffer nearly the same kinds of issues with its power connectors as the RTX 4090 did, so this design choice really flows down from engineers trying to fix potential problems with the much more power hungry 5090. But, if you're going to implement it for your flagship card, you might as well put it on all of the Founders Edition cards.

Unfortunately, this redesign means that if you invested in a 90-degree-angled 12VHPWR cable, it won't work on the RTX 5080 Founders Edition, though third-party partner cards will have a lot of different designs, so you should be able to find one that fits your cable situation..

• Design: 4.5 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080: Performance

• Excellent all-around performance
• Moderately more powerful than the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super, but nearly as fast as the RTX 4090 in gaming
• You'll need DLSS 4 to get the best results

Performance is king, though, and so naturally all the redesign and spec bumps won't amount to much if the RTX 5080 doesn't deliver better performance as a result, and fortunately it does—though maybe not as much as some enthusiasts would like.

Overall, the RTX 5080 manages to score about 13% better than the RTX 4080 and about 19% better than the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, a result that will disappoint some (especially after seeing the 20-25% uplift on the RTX 5090) who were hoping for something closer to 20% or better.

If we were just to go off those numbers, some might call them disappointing, regardless of all the other improvements to the RTX 5080 in terms of design and specs. All this needs to be put in a broader context though, because my perspective changed once I compared the RTX 5080 to the RTX 4090.

Overall, the RTX 5080 is within 12% of the overall performance of the RTX 4090, and within 9% of the RTX 4090's gaming performance, which is a hell of a thing and simply can't be ignored, even by enthusiasts.

Starting with the card's synthetic benchmarks, the card scores about 13% better than the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX, with the RTX 5080 consistently beating out the RTX 4080 and substantially beating the RX 7900 XTX in ray-traced workloads (though the RX 7900 XTX does pull down a slightly better average 1080p rasterization score, to its credit.

Compared to the RTX 4090, the RTX 5080 comes in at about 15% slower on average, with its worst performance coming at lower resolutions. At 4K, though, the RTX 5080 comes in just 7% slower than the last-gen flagship.

In terms of compute performance, the RTX 5080 trounces the RX 7900 XTX, as expected, by about 38%, with a more modest 9% improvement over the RTX 4080. Against the RTX 4090, however, the RTX 5080 comes within just 5% of the RTX 4090's Geekbench compute scores. If you're looking for a cheap AI card, the RTX 5080 is definitely going to be your jam.

On the creative side, PugetBench for Creators Adobe Photoshop benchmark still isn't working for the RTX 5080 Super, so I can't tell you much about its creative raster performance yet (though I will update these charts once that issue is fixed), but going off the 3D modeling and video editing scores, the RTX 5080 is an impressive GPU, as expected.

The entire 3D modeling industry is effectively built on Nvidia's CUDA, so against the RTX 5080, the RX 7900 XTX doesn't stand a chance as the 5080 more than doubles the RX 7900 XTX's Blender Benchmark performance. Gen-on-gen though, the RTX 5080 comes in with about 8% better performance.

Against the RTX 4090, the RTX 5080 comes within 15% on its performance, and for good measure, if you're rocking an RTX 3090 and you're curious about the RTX 5080, the RTX 5080 outperforms the RTX 3090 by about 75% in Blender Benchmark. If you're on an RTX 3090 and want to upgrade, you'll probably still be better off with an RTX 4090, but if you can't find one, the RTX 5080 is a great alternative.

In terms of video editing performance, the RTX 5080 doesn't do as well as its predecessor in PugetBench for Creators Adobe Premiere and effectively ties in my Handbrake 4K to 1080p encoding test. I expect that once the RTX 5080 launches, Puget Systems will be able to update its tools for the new RTX 50 series, so these scores will likely change, but for now, it is what it is, and you're not going to see much difference in your video editing workflows with this card over its predecessor.

The RTX 5080 is Nvidia's premium "gaming" card, though, so its gaming performance is what's going to matter to the vast majority of buyers out there. For that, you won't be disappointed. Working just off DLSS 3 with no frame generation, the RTX 5080 will get you noticeably improved framerates gen-on-gen at 1440p and 4K, with substantially better minimum/1% framerates as well for smoother gameplay. Turn on DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation and the RTX 5080 does even better, blowing well past the RTX 4090 in some titles.

DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation is game developer-dependent, however, so even though this is the flagship gaming feature for this generation of Nvidia GPUs, not every game will feature it. For testing purposes, then, I stick to DLSS 3 without Frame Generation (and the AMD and Intel equivalents, where appropriate), since this allows for a more apples-to-apples comparison between cards.

At 1440p, the RTX 5080 gets about 13% better average fps and minimum/1% fps overall, with up to 18% better ray tracing performance. Turn on DLSS 3 to balanced and ray tracing to its highest settings and the RTX 5080 gets you about 9% better average fps than its predecessor, but a massive 58% higher minimum/1% fps, on average.

Compared to the RTX 4090, the RTX 5080's average 1440p fps comes within 7% of the RTX 4090's, and within 2% of its minimum/1% fps, on average. In native ray-tracing performance, the RTX 5080 slips to within 14% of the RTX 4090's average fps and within 11% of its minimum/1% performance. Turn on balanced upscaling, however, and everything changes, with the RTX 5080 comes within just 6% of the RTX 4090's ray-traced upscaled average fps, and beats the RTX 4090's minimum/1% fps average by almost 40%.

Cranking things up to 4K, and the RTX 5080's lead over the RTX 4080 grows a good bit. With no ray tracing or upscaling, the RTX 5080 gets about 20% faster average fps and minimum/1% fps than the RTX 4080, overall. Its native ray tracing performance is about the same, however, and it's minimum/1% fps average actually falls behind the RTX 4080's, both with and without DLSS 3.

Against the RTX 4090, the RTX 5080 comes within 12% of its average fps and within 8% of its minimum/1% performance without ray tracing or upscaling. It falls behind considerably in native 4K ray tracing performance (which is to be expected, given the substantially higher RT core count for the RTX 4090), but when using DLSS 3, that ray tracing advantage is cut substantially and the RTX 5080 manages to come within 14% of the RTX 4090's average fps, and within 12% of its minimum/1% fps overall.

Taken together, the RTX 5080 makes some major strides in reaching RTX 4090 performance across the board, getting a little more than halfway across their respective performance gap between the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090.

The RTX 5080 beats its predecessor by just over 13% overall, and comes within 12% of the RTX 4090's overal performance, all while costing less than both RTX 40 series card's launch MSRP, making it an incredible value for a premium card to boot.

• Performance: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080?

Buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 if...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider

How I tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080

• I spent about a week and a half with the RTX 5080
• I used my complete GPU testing suite to analyze the card's performance
• I tested the card in everyday, gaming, creative, and AI workload usage

I spent about a week testing the RTX 5080, using my updated suite of benchmarks like Black Myth Wukong, 3DMark Steel Nomad, and more.

I also used this card as my primary work GPU where I relied on it for photo editing and design work, while also testing out a number of games on it like Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth Wukong, and others.

I've been testing graphics cards for TechRadar for a couple of years now, with more than two dozen GPU reviews under my belt. I've extensively tested and retested all of the graphics cards discussed in this review, so I'm intimately familiar with their performance. This gives me the best possible position to judge the merits of the RTX 5080, and whether it's the best graphics card for your needs and budget.

• Originally reviewed January 2024