Forget the RTX 5070, Even the RTX 5080 Can't Beat the RTX 4090

It wasn't a good week for Nvidia investors or fans. The company's stock price fell to its lowest level in a year, largely due to the unexpected success of DeepSeek and leaked RTX 5090 GPU benchmark results. While the synthetic benchmarks showed some nice improvements, the real-world results were pretty modest.

Interestingly, Nvidia itself has admitted that the RTX 5070 can't match the RTX 4090 without the help of "virtual" frames from DLSS 4. Perhaps 'Team Green' has realized that this 50-series card is one of the weakest generations of the RTX GeForce GPU brand in a long time, in terms of actual improvement.

And if you thought the RTX 5090 was disappointing, an early review of the RTX 5080 shows that the 'nightmare' of Nvidia's new graphics cards is about to continue.

igor'sLAB just 'accidentally' published a review of the RTX 5080 earlier than expected, and Nvidia's new 80-class GeForce card shows very little improvement over the RTX 4080 SUPER. The RTX 5080 is only 8.3% faster than the RTX 4080 SUPER on average across 11 games, and compared to the RTX 4080, the difference can be around 12-15%.

When compared to competing products from AMD, the RTX 5080 is only 8.4% faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 27.4% better than the RX 7900 XT.

So even the $999 RTX 5080 can't beat the RTX 4090. This proves once again that Nvidia has been over-hyping the 5000 series cards.

However, the test was performed at 1440p resolution, which means that the results at 4K will likely be better, just as the RTX 5090 also performed much better at 4K than 1440p. Additionally, these are early driver versions, so it's possible that there's a driver performance issue affecting these GPUs, unless it's an architectural flaw that Nvidia can't fix with software updates alone.

According to data from TechPowerUp, this could be one of Nvidia's worst generational improvements in a long time, since the Maxwell era (900 series cards).

1. 980 --> 1080 = 51%
2. 1080 --> 2080 = 39%
3. 2080 --> 3080 = 63%
4. 3080 --> 4080 = 49%
5. 4080 --> 5080 ~= 10-12%

Power consumption isn't a standout factor in this comparison either, with igor'sLAB reporting that the RTX 5080 consumes just 4.3% more (289.7 watts) than the RTX 4080 SUPER.

Kareem Winters

Update 02 February 2025