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).

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.

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.

The RTX 5080 Founders Edition at $999 makes far more sense for enthusiasts targeting max-setting gaming and ultra-HD resolutions if you can find it at MSRP.

Your shiny new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card shouldn't melt due to a bad power cable connection, unlike some RTX 4090 cards.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card is exceptionally powerful but forbiddingly expensive. (You could build a complete RTX 5080-based gaming PC for the money.) But this top-tier GPU lives on a whole other planet of performance.

Nvidia’s new RTX 5080 graphics card isn’t as exciting as I was hoping it would be. While the sleek new Founders Edition redesign dramatically shrinks the size of the card compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super,