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Leaked RTX 5080 benchmark: it’s slower than the RTX 4090

Nvidia RTX 5080 render
Nvidia

A set of newly leaked benchmarks has revealed the performance capabilities of Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 5080 GPU. Scheduled to launch alongside the RTX 5090 on January 30, the GPU was spotted on the Geekbench browser under OpenCL and Vulkan benchmark tests — and based on the performance, it might not make it among the best graphics cards.

First spotted by Benchleaks, the benchmark data seems to have been inadvertently made public by a reviewer. According to the listing, the RTX 5080 tested was an MSI-branded unit with the model number MS-7E62. The GPU was paired with AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU—currently regarded as the most powerful processor for gaming—an MSI MPG 850 Edge TI Wi-Fi motherboard, and 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory.

In the Vulkan benchmark, the RTX 5080 scored 261,836 points and 256,138 in the OpenCL test. Compared to the average performance of its predecessor, the RTX 4080, the RTX 5080 is approximately 22% faster in Vulkan. However, the improvement in OpenCL is more modest, offering just a 6.7% increase.

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Additionally, the RTX 5080 has been spotted on the Blender Open Data platform, thanks to Reddit user TruthPhoenixV. According to the platform, the RTX 5080 achieved a median score of 9,063.77, making it about 9.4% better than the RTX 4080 and 8.2% ahead of the RTX 4080 Super.

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The leaked benchmarks also suggest that the RTX 5080 might fall short of surpassing the RTX 4090 in performance. Traditionally, 80-class GPUs have outperformed 90-class GPUs from the previous generation, but that trend seems to be changing, with the RTX 5080 reportedly trailing the RTX 4090.

That said, it’s important to note that these benchmark results have not been fully verified. Prospective buyers should wait for the official review embargo to lift before drawing conclusions.

As a quick recap, the RTX 5080 is built on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture, featuring 10,752 CUDA cores across 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs)—a significant increase from the 9,728 cores found in the RTX 4080. It also includes 16GB of next-gen GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus. Nvidia claims a theoretical AI performance of 1,801 TOPS via Tensor Cores and 171 Teraflops of ray tracing performance through its RT Cores.

The RTX 5080 is priced starting at $1,000, though board partner models are expected to carry higher price tags.

Kunal Khullar
Kunal Khullar is a computing writer at Digital Trends who contributes to various topics, including CPUs, GPUs, monitors, and…
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