More than likely, we're going to get the long-awaited Nvidia RTX 5080 later this year. After all, the RTX 4080 launched about two years ago in October 2022, with the RTX 3080 preceding it in 2020. And from everything we've seen, this two year cycle is going to continue in 2024 with the RTX 5080, according to prolific GPU leakers, and spotted by VideoCardz.
Whenever it appears, it will have big boots to fill. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 is one of the best graphics cards with its superb performance, ray tracing chops, and vigorous frame rate-boosting DLSS 3. Its hefty $1,199 price tag raised a few eyebrows, but if the RTX 5080 launches with a similar slate of improvements, we could be in for another pricey top-tier card.
Nvidia RTX 5080 release date
Since 2016, Nvidia has launched a new generation of RTX cards every two years, with the latest appearing in 2022. While that would put the 50 series on track for a 2024 release, and it looks like its going to continue this year.
Originally it was thought the RTX 5090 alone would be launching in late 2024, which was even backed up by known Nvidia leaker MooresLawisDead on YouTube. However, another known Nvidia leaker, Kopite7Kimi on Twitter commented on the matter saying the RTX 5090 would be preceded by the RTX 5080. This is pure speculation at this point, and you shouldn't place too much faith in either leaker, but it looks like we're getting at least one Nvidia Blackwell graphics card this year.
Typically, Nvidia would launch a few graphics cards all at once, but if Nvidia launches this lineup in a similar manner to the Ada Lovelace cards, we probably will only see one or two new graphics cards in 2024, with the RTX 5070 likely following at CES 2025. But we'll just have to wait to see what Nvidia actually has in store this time around.
Nvidia RTX 5080 price
The price of the RTX 5080 is still something of a mystery, not least because of Nvidia’s questionable handling of the last generation of GeForce cards. The RTX 4080 launched for $1,199, an eye-watering $500 bump on the $699 RTX 3080. The price increase was largely explained by significant performance improvements enabled by the integration of DLSS 3 and 16GB of VRAM.
Nvidia had initially planned to roll out a cheaper 12GB version that was priced in line with previous XX80 models. But it pulled out of the launch last year, explaining that “two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing”. Instead, it effectively renamed and reintroduced the card as the RTX 2070 Ti. It launched at a cool $799, which is a good way cheaper than the RTX 4080 but still $100 over the RTX 3080.
Unfortunately, that intergenerational price trend probably isn’t going anywhere. As Nvidia continues to rely on performance gains to justify lofty price increases, a $1000-plus RTX 5080 is in no way out of the question.
The bigger mystery, however, is whether Nvidia will try to launch two versions of the card as it failed to do with its predecessor. Perhaps it’s by now worked out how to do that without confusing customers, and so can justify a second, slightly cheaper RTX 5080 variant.
Nvidia RTX 5080 specs
Though Nvidia still has the RTX 5080 specs locked behind closed doors, the usual slew of leaks and insider rumors has given us an indication of what to expect.
Prolific Nvidia leaker Kopite7kimi tweeted earlier this year that the RTX 5090 will feature a 512-bit memory interface – one metric that determines a GPU’s total memory capacity and throughput. That would put it cleanly above the 384-bit ceiling of previous RTX cards. And while such a high width may be reserved for the 50 series’ flagship GPU, it suggests a memory upgrade for the RTX 5080 is also on the table.
There’s also a growing expectation that the RTX 5080 will feature GDDR7 memory. Samsung has already revealed its completed development of the next-gen DRAM, which will bring the usual improvements in speed, throughput and energy efficiency. Samsung’s hardware partners will start to install it in their systems for testing later this year, while competitor Micron recently revealed in an earnings report that it plans to introduce its own GDDR7 memory chips in the first half of 2024. All of which is to say that by the time the RTX 5080 hits the market, it could well be GDDR7-equipped.
It’s a similar story with the card’s connectivity. PCI-e 5.0 has been floating around for a few years but has rarely appeared on consumer hardware. With a few SSDs and a growing number of motherboards now starting to support the standard, the next wave of GPUs may follow suit.
It’s also looking likely that the RTX 5080 will be joined by four other cards in the series. Several posts on the Chinese tech forum Chiphell, later corroborated with Kopite7kimi by VideoCardz, name what some believe to be Nvidia’s next-gen GPU line-up. Each card is cryptically labeled – GB202, GB203, GB205, GB206, and GB207 – though that fits the naming conventions of past Nvidia generations. The final digit indicates the tier of the card, with the lower number being better. So, we’d expect the GB202 to be the RTX 5090, the GB2023 the RTX 5080, and so on. Where any extra Ti cards will fit into all of that isn’t quite clear.
It’s worth noting that these leaks don’t explicitly mention the 50 series per se, but rather Nvidia’s next-gen Blackwell architecture. Blackwell is the general-purpose, commercial variant of Nvidia’s forthcoming gaming architecture that will be used primarily in data centers. That possibly explains why the cards are labeled as part of the GB200 series – the GB100 naming scheme is reserved for the commercial cards, leaving the GPUs to pick up the second-order category.
Nvidia RTX 5080 performance
We expect the RTX 5080 will build on the key features of its predecessor: new-gen Tensor Cores, more RT (ray tracing) cores, a boosted clock speed, and more GPU cores. Improved rasterization and ray tracing is almost a certainty, given that’s what Nvidia has hitched its wagon to over the last few years, as well as improved path tracing. Perhaps we’ll also see the RTX 5080 support 8K gaming, given the RTX 4080 is more than capable of running games in 4K.
