NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition Review With Copious Benchmarks

Speed Way is the most recent addition to the UL 3DMark graphics test suite. Speed Way uses the DirectX 12 Ultimate API and leverages advanced features like DirectX Ray Tracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and ray traced reflections, Mesh Shaders, and high resolution textures and artwork. All of the graphics cards here were testing using the default benchmark options should you want to compare the performance of your system to our test rig...

UL 3DMark Speed Way DX12 Ultimate Benchmarks

In 3DMark's most advanced graphics test, the GeForce RTX 5080 FE outpaced the RTX 4080 by approximately 20% and finishes well ahead of AMD's current top-end Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

Hardware monitor during this benchmark run shows nice stable clocks for the GeForce RTX 5080 FE, with relatively low temperatures as well. 

UL 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 Benchmarks

3DMark Steel Nomad is one of the newer cross-platform GPU benchmarks developed by UL Solutions as part of the 3DMark suite. This test is designed to evaluate the performance of modern gaming hardware in non-ray-traced scenarios, but using otherwise advanced rendering techniques with DX12.

The new GeForce RTX 5080 FE outperforms is predecessor and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX by about 19% in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark. The RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 finish well ahead, though.

VR Benchmarks: VR Mark & Unigine Superposition

Superposition is an aging benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in too. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some excellent visuals. We ran Superposition's VR Future benchmark to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition VR Future Test

Unigine's VR Future benchmark had the GeForce RTX 5080 FE landing right in the middle of the pack. The GeForce RTX 5080 FE clearly outperformed the previous-gen RTX 4080 here, but can't catch the RTX 4090, let alone the flagship RTX 5090.

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark was designed to test a PC’s readiness for HMDs like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is the most taxing test offered by the tool.


The framerates are much higher in VRMark versus Unigine's VR Future benchmark, but the deltas separating the cards aren't very different. Once again the GeForce RTX 5080 FE lands in the middle of the pack, outpacing the RTX 4080 by about 13%, but finishing well behind the previous-gen RTX 4090.