Overall Average FPS
Results are added together, then averaged out for each graphics card at each resolution to give you an overall picture of their relative performance.
As we look at the overall averages, starting at 1080p, we see the 5080 sat pretty much exactly where we expected based on the rest of the charts that we looked at, sitting right below the 4090, but above the 4080 SUPER. This resolution has the tamest differences we saw, as a result of the CPU bottleneck we experience, so we only see a 5% increase in performance over the last generation, but equally, it doesn’t fall that far behind with only 3% less performance than the 4090. So nothing too extraordinary here, but if you’re buying a 5080 then realistically you aren’t playing at 1080p anyway.
Something a bit more realistic is 1440p, where we see some of the gaps start to widen somewhat, with the 5080 now sitting 9% ahead of the 4080 and 4080 SUPER, which came in with an identical average FPS. Now I do want to put a caveat on this, as the only reason they come in identically is due to Counter-Strike 2 running pretty abysmally on the 4080 SUPER and therefore bringing both 4080 cards closer together again, though omitting this result would see more of a difference, but we’re focussing on the 5080 here, and not so much the 4080. Now, the gaps do get wider on both sides of the card however, and whilst we did see a bit of a boost with the older 80 series cards, we also see the 4090 take a bigger lead ahead of the 5080, now with 9% more performance than the newer card. This and 4K is really where you’ll be playing with a card like this so it’s nice to see a slight improvement over the same tier of card from last generation as I think gone are the days where a newer XX80 series would try to replace the older XX90 series.
4K is more than playable with an average frame rate of 163 FPS, which ends up being 9% higher than the 4080 SUPER, much like we saw at 1440p while compared to the non-SUPER variant, the newer 5080 comes in around 12% ahead. Compared to the 4090 we see that the 5080 is outperformed by 11%, making this the biggest gap between the two we’ve seen. For its pricing, the 5080 delivers solid results. It’s not groundbreaking but still competes well. Against AMD’s RX 7900 XTX, which is priced similarly, the RTX 5080 shows a 16% lead in average FPS—a notable win for NVIDIA. The lows do look a lot better in the overall averages, but I do still feel that while some games had a strong 1% low performance, others still suffered, and this could see a lot of change through driver refinements. Performance here is fine, but I do feel that the card needs to mature a little and performance could increase as time goes on.
