- NVIDIA RTX 5080 Geekbench results shared
- They roughly suggest a 20% gen uplift over the RTX 4080
- However, the RTX 5080 seems to fall 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 streaming world has turned to the RTX 5080.
Reviews of this second GPU from Blackwell GeForce are imminent, and thanks to Benchleaks (via Tom’s Hardware) we’ve taken a purported Geekbench result (be skeptical with this, as with such a spill).
The results are from Geekbench graphics tests and they suggest that the RTX 5080 will achieve a score of around 262,000 in Vulkan and 256,000 in OpenCL.
This would represent a generational increase of around 20% (a bit more) in performance over the RTX 4080 with the Vulkan score, but less than 10% for OpenCL. As Tom notes, Blackwell Vulkan Performance seems stronger than OpenCL.
As our sister site points out, the Vulkan score here is actually pretty close to the RTX 4090, but the RTX 5080 is a little far behind 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: Consistent with other speculations,
As always, when looking at benchmarks, synthetic results aren’t as valuable as real-world gaming tests, and Geekbench isn’t the first place anyone would turn for a metric to judge gaming prowess of a graphics card. But nonetheless, it gives us a hint as to where the RTX 5080 might land in terms of raw power for PC gaming.
And, as this clue says, it’s pretty much what I expected. Pushing OpenCL’s score to one side, I’d say a 20% performance lift (for rasterized, non-DLSS, non-raycast games) rings on the money, based on the rumor mill’s previous spinning – but obviously we ‘It is still far from being able to draw this conclusion.
It’s worth remembering that games that support DLSS 4 (and Nvidia’s new frame generation technology, MFG) can expect a much greater frame rate boost from the RTX 5080, or even one of the new Blackwell desktop graphics cards. And it’s worth noting that while the RTX 4080 was an undeniable major leap in performance for an xx80-class graphics card, the price Nvidia stuck to was shocking at the time, and meant we weren’t a fan in our review (And this GPU didn’t fly off the shelves by any means, back in the day).
We’re now more acclimated to Nvidia’s heavy pricing at the high end, and sure enough, with the RTX 5080, its MSRP has returned to $999 in the US (compared to $1,199 for the RTX 4080). So it’s something of a win for consumers, but a grand is still an enticing sum to part 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 February at some point. If you’re planning to buy the GPU next week, we’ve got a list of the best places to keep an eye on RTX 5080 stock. However, this graphics card is running out of stock, and so it could sell out very quickly – you might need some good luck to land your next-gen GPU.
