Nvidia followed up the most powerful GPU it’s ever made, the RTX 5090, with this — the RTX 5080. It’s half the price, and it offers around 70% of the performance. That should be a good thing, but the RTX 5080 falls short when compared to Nvidia’s last-gen offerings that still rank among the best graphics cards.

The RTX 5080 Founders Edition uses the same lovely shroud as the top RTX Blackwell card, and brings the same DLSS/MFG feature set to the table. But that's all that is really setting the second-tier card apart from the RTX 4080 Super as the gen-on-gen performance difference is marginal at best.

When it comes to GPUs, Nvidia's still at the top, and the RTX 50 series is the new hotness. Here are the best ways to score the 5080 and 5090 graphics cards.

The best argument for grabbing a 5080 right now, if you can find one at $999 in the first place, is that the only cards that come close to its performance are either way more expensive than they're supposed to be (the 4080 Super) or not cheap enough to justify the Nvidia-specific features you give up (AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX).

It’s disappointing to see Nvidia has stuck with 16GB of VRAM on the RTX 5080. AMD’s RX 7900 XTX offers 24GB, and while the RTX 5080 delivers better performance for now, it may well hit video memory limits in 4K gaming in the future.

Nvidia warns of 'significant demand' for the graphics cards, which go on sale early Thursday morning. Still, Nvidia says it'll be shipping more supplies to retailers every day.

Nvidia is launching its next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards tomorrow, and it looks like there will be low stocks of both cards. After rumors of the RTX 5090 being in short supply for retailers and card manufacturers,

Word from Nvidia about the supply of its flagship graphics cards appeared on its GeForce Forums. A forum administrator and Nvidia staff member who goes by Tim@NVIDIA wrote today, “We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen.