![The RTX 5080 graphics card by Nvidia](https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/01/1737649543_rtx_5080_story.jpg)
It has not been a great time to be an Nvidia investor or an Nvidia fan this past week or so. The company's share price saw the biggest dip after DeepSeek's success prompting a response, and the RTX 5090 reviews also saw mediocre gains even though synthetic benchmarks showed very good improvements.
It was interesting seeing Nvidia itself cooling down the initial (over)hype it created after it admitted that the RTX 5070 was nowhere close to the RTX 4090 without the help of DLSS 4 "fake" frames. The company probably realized that the 50-series is probably its weakest in a long time in terms of actual generational uplift.
And if you thought the RTX 5090 was disappointing, an early review of the RTX 5080 suggests that the disappointing launch run of Nvidia's new cards is going to continue.
igor'sLAB mistakenly published the review of the RTX 5080 early and the new 80-class Nvidia GeForce card is showing very little improvement compared to the RTX 4080 SUPER. The 5080 was found to be just 8.3% faster on average across 11 games compared to the 4080 SUPER variant and against the 4080, the difference could be around 12-15%.
In terms of AMD competition, the RTX 5080 is 8.4% faster than the 7900 XTX and 27.4% better than the XT.
![rtx 5080 early review leak](https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/01/1738151828_5080_review_leak_source_igorslab_story.jpg)
Thus even the $999 5080 is failing to beat the 4090 proving again that Nvidia hyped the 5000 series a bit too much.
The test was at 1440p though which means the numbers at 4K will likely be better seeing how the 5090 too is doing much better at 4K compared to at 1440p. These are early drivers and so there is potentially a driver overhead issue currently hurting these GPUs unless it is an architectural flaw that Nvidia can't quite make up with software fixes alone.
According to TechPowerUp data, this suggests one of the poorest generational uplifts from Nvidia in a very long time starting from Maxwell (900 series GPUs).
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980 --> 1080 = 51%
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1080 --> 2080 = 39%
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2080 --> 3080 = 63%
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3080 --> 4080 = 49%
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4080 --> 5080 ~=10-12%
Power draw is also not a winning factor this time as igor'sLAB reported a 4.3% increased consumption (289.7 watts) on the RTX 5080 vs the 4080 SUPER.
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