MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC Review: A Cut Above
Our Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (4.7GHz - 5.2GHz, 8-Core) MSI X870E Carbon WiFi 32GB G.SKILL DDR5-6000 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio / Network Radeon RX 7900 XTX Radeon RX 9070 GeForce RTX 4070 GeFoce RTX 5070 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GeForce RTX 5080 GeForce RTX 5090 MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 AMD Radeon v24.12.1 NVIDIA Drivers v576.52 / v580.88 |
Benchmarks Used: MLPerf Client Geekbench AI Procyon AI Text Generation Procyon AI Stable Diffusion XL Blender v4.3 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v4.3.1 V-Ray UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition Games Tested: Assassin's Creed Mirage Black Myth Wukong Homeworld 3 Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Cyberpunk 2077 The Talos Principle II F1 24 |
MLPerf Client Benchmarks
The MLPerf Client benchmark was designed by MLCommons to evaluate machine learning inference tasks on PCs. It focuses on client form factors and aims to measure how well different hardware and software configurations handle four different AI workloads using a single model. It supports DirectML via ONNX Runtime for a wide range of hardware, but Intel also gets a specialized OpenVINO path for now. Participants in MLCommons are also able to optimize the models for their hardware, but must meet strict guidelines for accuracy.
Considering its similar features, but somewhat higher clocks than NVIDIA's reference design, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC lands right where you'd expect it in MLPerf. The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC outran the Founders Edition card and finishes behind only the GeForce RTX 5090.
Considering its similar features, but somewhat higher clocks than NVIDIA's reference design, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC lands right where you'd expect it in MLPerf. The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC outran the Founders Edition card and finishes behind only the GeForce RTX 5090.
Geekbench AI Testing
Geekbench AI is a cross-platform benchmark tool designed to evaluate the performance of AI workloads on a wide range devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. It measures the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs (Neural Processing Units) across different operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux with an array of machine learning tasks.
No matter what we tried, including tweaking power modes or trying different drivers, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC ended up trailing NVIDIA's own GeForce RTX 5080 in Geekbench AI. We suspect something in the MSI card's firmware isn't allowing it to boost as high, as quickly as the Founders Edition card. Still, its right there in the mix with the fastest cards of the bunch.
No matter what we tried, including tweaking power modes or trying different drivers, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC ended up trailing NVIDIA's own GeForce RTX 5080 in Geekbench AI. We suspect something in the MSI card's firmware isn't allowing it to boost as high, as quickly as the Founders Edition card. Still, its right there in the mix with the fastest cards of the bunch.
UL Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmarks
The Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmark is a tool developed by UL Solutions to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Windows PCs. It features real-world use cases and uses seven prompts with both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and non-RAG queries. It tests various AI models like Phi-3.5-mini, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Llama-2-13B. These tests were run using ONNX with DirectML, not TensorRT, which is optimal for NVIDIA's RTX series discrete GPUs, but unavailable in this test at this time with this particular test.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC's higher clocks, however, allowed it to outrun the Founders Edition card by a few percentage points in Procyon's LLM text generation benchmark. Once again, the MSI card wins the silver, behind only the RTX 5090.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC's higher clocks, however, allowed it to outrun the Founders Edition card by a few percentage points in Procyon's LLM text generation benchmark. Once again, the MSI card wins the silver, behind only the RTX 5090.
UL Procyon Stable Diffusion XL AI Image Generation
The Procyon AI Image Generation Benchmark measures inference performance for image generation tasks. It includes several tests, with the Stable Diffusion XL (FP16) test we used here being the most demanding. The test is designed to evaluate a wide range of hardware from low power NPUs to high-end discrete GPUs and it can be configured to use different inference engines like NVIDIA TensorRT, Intel OpenVINO, and ONNX with DirectML. Unfortunately, the TensorRT engine hasn’t been updated for Blackwell just yet, but we tested it with ONNX to provide a point of reference versus the RTX 40 series cards.
We didn't have a chance to re-test the RTX 5090 again for this one, but it would most certainly take the top spot. In any case, we see the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC slightly outpacing NVIDIA's Founder's Edition card for image generation as well.
Blender v4.3 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation, through simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing or game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmark tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...
There's no catching the powerful GeForce RTX 5090 in the various rendering workloads that compose the Blender benchmark, but the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC manages to outrun all of the other cards we've tested to date.
V-Ray Rendering
The V-Ray Benchmark is a free tool that measures rendering performance on CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, or a combination of both. The GPU benchmark in particular features a complex scene designed to evaluate the capabilities of both the RTX and CUDA-based V-Ray 6 render engines.
We saw more of the same with V-Ray. In this path tracing benchmark, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC slots in just ahead of the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition, but well behind the flagship RTX 5090.
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that determines the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video frames. The tool can be used to evaluate performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting four results here, at 8K and 4K resolutions, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
At both resolutions and compression levels, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC effectively ties with the Founders Edition card. The slight variances between the two are within the margin of error for this benchmark. Needless to say, Blackwell is well-suited for creators, especially those that work with high-quality video.
