New Nvidia RTX 5080 benchmark rumor has got me worried that the GPU won’t be a major upgrade to the RTX 4080
- Purported Nvidia RTX 5080 Geekbench results have been shared
- They suggest roughly a 20% gen-on-gen uplift compared to the RTX 4080
- However, the RTX 5080 appears to come up short compared to the older RTX 4090
With the RTX 5090 now reviewed and fully evaluated – as an undoubtedly powerful GPU, albeit to the point of overkill in many ways – the attention of the benchmark-spilling world has turned to the RTX 5080.
Reviews of this second Blackwell GeForce GPU are imminent, and thanks to Benchleaks (via Tom’s Hardware), we’ve caught a purported Geekbench result (be skeptical with it, as with any such spillage).
The results are for the graphics tests from Geekbench and they suggest that the RTX 5080 will hit a score of around 262,000 in Vulkan and 256,000 in OpenCL.
That would represent about a 20% generational increase (just over) in performance compared to the RTX 4080 with the Vulkan score, but less than 10% for OpenCL. As Tom’s notes, Blackwell Vulkan performance appears stronger than OpenCL.
As our sister site further points out, the Vulkan score here is actually quite close to the RTX 4090, but the RTX 5080 is some way off with OpenCL, as the last-gen flagship is about 20% faster than the new graphics card.
The RTX 5090 is around 40% and 45% faster than the RTX 5080, if you were wondering how the new flagship stacks up, but again this is based on rumors.
Analysis: In line with other speculation, pretty much
As always when looking at benchmarks, synthetic results aren’t as valuable as real-world gaming tests, and Geekbench is not the first place anyone would turn to for a metric to judge a graphics card’s gaming prowess by. But nonetheless, this does give us something of a clue about where the RTX 5080 might land in terms of raw power for PC games.
And, as this hint goes, it’s pretty much what I expected. Pushing the OpenCL score to one side, I’d say a 20% performance uplift (for rasterized, non-DLSS, non-ray tracing games) sounds about on the money, based on previous spinning from the rumor mill – but obviously we’re still a long way from being able to draw that conclusion.
It’s worth remembering that games which support DLSS 4 (and Nvidia’s new frame generation tech, MFG) can expect a way, way bigger frame rate boost from the RTX 5080, or indeed any of the new Blackwell desktop graphics cards. And it’s equally worth noting that while the RTX 4080 was an undoubted major leap in performance for an xx80-class graphics card, the price that Nvidia stuck on it was shocking at the time, and meant we weren’t a fan in our review (and this GPU did not fly off the shelves by any means, back in the day).
We’re now more acclimatized to Nvidia’s weighty pricing at the higher-end, and of course, with the RTX 5080, its MSRP has dropped back to $999 in the US (compared to $1,199 for the RTX 4080). So that’s something of a win for consumers, albeit a grand is still an eye-watering sum to be parting with for a desktop GPU.
Nvidia’s RTX 5080 arrives on January 30, alongside the RTX 5090, with the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti following in February at some point. If you’re planning on buying the GPU next week, we’ve got a list of the best places to keep an eye on for stock of the RTX 5080. However, this graphics card is rumored to be short on stock, and so could sell out very quickly – you might need a fair bit of good fortune to land your next-gen GPU.
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Purported Nvidia RTX 5080 Geekbench results have been shared They suggest roughly a 20% gen-on-gen uplift compared to the RTX 4080 However, the RTX 5080 appears to come up short compared to the older RTX 4090 With the RTX 5090 now reviewed and fully evaluated – as an undoubtedly powerful…
