Nvidia RTX 5080 Slower Than RTX 4090 in Leaked Performance Results: Report

The Nvidia RTX 5080 may fail to impress when it debuts in just a few days’ time, as leaked benchmark results suggest the card may not eclipse the last-generation king, the RTX 4090. The Geekbench and 3DMark Time Spy results are far from definitive, but they paint a picture that the RTX 5080 may be as much as 20% slower than the RTX 4090, and not much more than 10% faster than the RTX 4080 Super. Although the lower suggested retail price for the RTX 5080 might help, this may not be enough to persuade RTX-40-series owners to upgrade.

The Nvidia RTX 50-series has been a mixed bag since its initial debut to pomp and fanfare at CES 2025, where CEO Jensen Huang made the claim that the RTX 5090 would offer double the performance of the RTX 4090, and that the RTX 5070 would be comparable with the 4090, with the help of AI. It has since turned out that the 5090 is, at best, 30% faster than the 4090 without AI involved—and that multi-frame generation technology is good but not something you can use anywhere with no downsides.

With the RTX 5080 being priced at half that of the RTX 5090 ($1,000 versus $2,000), it was expected to be the more realistic purchase for gamers looking for an upgrade to the latest architecture. It sports more CUDA cores than its predecessors, with new generations of RT and Tensor cores, support for the latest DLSS standards, and its pricing was supposed to undercut the RTX 4080 Super, which typically retails for between $1,200 and $1,500

But these leaked benchmark results for the 5080 cast doubt on that hope. In Wccftech’s leaked benchmark results, the 5080 paired with a 9800X3D scored 281,746 points in Geekbench’s Vulkan test, and 278,138 points in its OpenCL test. In comparison, an RTX 4090 and the same CPU managed 365,013 points, and 337,319 points, respectively. That’s a 23% and 18% difference, putting the RTX 5080 decidedly behind the 4090 in raw power.

In 3DMark, the RTX 5080 reportedly managed a graphics score of 32,701 points in Time Spy (as per @olrak29_). Similarly, specced PCs fitted with an RTX 4090 should manage around 36,000, while RTX 4080 super PCs should hit around 28,000. 

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We’ll want to see real-world gaming benchmarks before we can draw any firm conclusions about the RTX 5080, but its muted performance gains would fit in line with the less-than-revolutionary performance of the RTX 5090.

It almost feels as if AMD and Nvidia have hit a performance-to-watt wall this generation. It’s the first time in many years that Nvidia hasn’t supplanted the previous generation 90 series card with its next-generation 80-series alternative, while the flagship makes mediocre progress at best. It just seems a shame that this is the generation that AMD is refusing to compete at the top end for. 

Moore’s Law continues to loom over even the biggest of tech giants, it seems.