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.

I spent a week extensively testing the RTX 5080, and overall it's the best premium graphics card for most people you can get right now.

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).

The Nvidia RTX 5090 is easily the best graphics card on the market right now, offering fantastic performance for gaming, creating, and AI workloads that few other cards can compete with. There is one card that can hold its own against Nvidia's latest high-end card, and that's Nvidia's last-gen flagship, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090.

GPU maker NVIDIA has warned consumers that the stock of its forthcoming RTX 5090 and 5080 cards will be limited. Some gamers are even camping out to get one.

We later learned it uses DLSS 4’s AI-powered multi frame generation to achieve that in supported titles, but that’s a welcome compromise for those who can’t find room in their budget for the beefier 4K-ready GPUs that are on sale right now — including the $999.