I’ve now owned the RTX 5080 FE for two weeks, so after using it a lot, I wanted to do a quick review of my thoughts so far. I cover the card both from a content creation perspective, and also a gaming perspective.

I’m also clear that the card is sometimes massively overpriced (such as the RTX 5080 Astral), and it has also been really buggy. Cyberpunk 2077 is unplayable for me right now, for example.

So I discuss all this (and more) in this video:

Some of the videos/resources I mention in this video include:

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

My NVIDIA RTX 5080 FE on my desk

A Flawless RTX 50 Launch…

Hey, everyone. I bought this card two weeks ago, and I think we can all agree that the RTX 50 launch has been flawless. There’s been loads of stock, no problems at all with getting a card. You can even buy one for less than MSRP because Nvidia and the board partners are just acting out of the goodness of their heart.

I personally have had no issues at all with this card. I mean, when I’m using Windows, it certainly doesn’t flicker with black screens and things like that. I certainly have no issues whatsoever with my dual monitor setup, and I can finally play Cyberpunk with no issues at all. I mean, it runs flawlessly and games for hours on end with no crashes or anything like that.

That is what I would be saying if we lived in some alternate universe, but we live in this timeline, unfortunately. As we all know, the RTX 50 series launch hasn’t exactly been smooth. But despite that, I’ve actually been fairly impressed with my RTX 5080, other than playing Cyberpunk and one or two other annoying bugs, which I wanted to talk about in this mini-review. Actually, if you can get a card for close to MSRP, I think it’s actually a fairly good deal.

Kidding. It’s Good For Content Creation Though

The first thing that I’ve actually been really impressed with, with this RTX 5080, is from a content creation perspective. That’s because previously, I was using my AMD graphics card with an AMD CPU, and that’s bad decision-making on my part. Previously, as a content creator, what you would usually do is have an Intel CPU that has Quick Sync technology, and that Quick Sync technology really helps with video editing and things like that. It really speeds things up. Obviously, having an AMD CPU and GPU wasn’t really ideal for that.

Now, I’ve actually got the Nvidia graphics card—I’ve got too many boxes in my hand—but now that I’ve actually got this Nvidia graphics card, I can actually see that I probably don’t need as powerful of a CPU going forward. When I’m doing video editing, whether I’m cutting clips, moving things around, playing back the timeline, or previewing things, the actual graphics card is doing nearly all that work now, not the CPU. Then, when I come to do the final export, again, the graphics card is doing everything.

Previously, what I was seeing with my AMD system is the graphics card was only in use like 10 to 20%, and my CPU was actually doing all the work. That’s why I had a 12-core Ryzen CPU in my workstation computer, because my AMD GPU didn’t really support things as well as it could have. Obviously, this point isn’t specific to the RTX 5080—I could have gone out and bought a 30 series card or 40 series card, and that would have done a lot of the video encoding, playback, and stuff too, lightening the load on my CPU. That’s a point I wanted to make.

What is actually really interesting in the RTX 50 series release is they have more support for video codecs. For example, 4:2:2 10-bit video is now supported natively with the RTX 50 series range, and it wasn’t with the 40 series range. What that actually means is when you’re video editing, it’s now a lot quicker and smoother if your camera shoots in 10-bit, because now you’ve got native support for that with your Nvidia GPU. That also means you no longer need an Intel CPU, because previously you needed that Intel Quick Sync technology to actually handle that, and now you don’t need that.

So now it’s actually perfectly viable to go out and have a 50 series Nvidia card and an AMD CPU, even like an X3D gaming chip or something, because you just don’t need as much processing power from your CPU because of the RTX 50 series. That is pretty cool. What’s also cool is that export times have been sped up quite a lot on the 50 series. I’m not exactly sure how they’ve achieved this, but Nvidia has a video—which I’ll link to down in the description—that actually shows there’s a substantial improvement in the 50 series compared to the 40 series. Actually, this has quicker export times than the 4090. I don’t know exactly how they’ve achieved that—I’m holding the box upside down.

NVIDIA’s Game Recorder

Also, when I come to export, I actually have more encoding options available. For example, the 50 series has support for the AV1 codec, and I can do two-pass filters and things like that, which I couldn’t do previously with my AMD GPU. I also really like the game recording mode that’s built into the Nvidia app, which was previously called ShadowPlay. Actually, it’s amazing. Literally, I know I’ve got quite a powerful graphics card, but even if I’m playing at 4K, 60 FPS can be recorded with no issue whatsoever. It doesn’t result in any FPS drop-off at all, and that’s because there’s a separate video encoder and decoder actually built into the graphics card, which is separate from the graphical rendering part for gaming and stuff.

You can actually record games with no FPS drop-off—or at least anything I’ve seen is less than a 1% drop-off, which is really good. Again, I know I can’t compare these too much because obviously this was like three times the price of this graphics card, but really, I couldn’t record my screen with this particular graphics card. I’d have to go to OBS at 1440p, record at 30 FPS, and even then, I would get a noticeable FPS drop-off. What I can actually do with the RTX 5080 seems like some voodoo black magic, because I can literally record games at 8K at 60 FPS if I wanted, with no drop-off whatsoever in the FPS rate. I don’t know how they’ve achieved that.

What it does mean is I don’t actually need a capture card anymore, because previously I actually had two computers and a capture card in one of them, so I could record the output from the other one—the gaming output from the other one—with no FPS drop-off. But now, I’m actually looking to sell that because I can just hit record in the Nvidia app when playing a game with my RTX 5080, and it just works. So that is really cool.

From a content creator perspective, I’m very happy with the RTX 5080, and that is partly why I bought it. It’s got the two video encoders and decoders, and it’s got enough sort of raw processing power or rendering power that actually, you know, I can probably reduce my CPU requirements in the future and sell my capture card and everything like that. So that is really good.

Gaming Performance

When it comes to gaming, it’s a bit more hit-or-miss, because obviously, as we know, the generational gain is only like 10% more than the 480 Super. That is a fair point that a lot of the reviewers have made, because you do need to think about things like that. But actually, if you look at the card in isolation, it’s a pretty damn good card at MSRP. I’ll talk about the pricing later, because I know it’s just gone ridiculous, especially in America. Certainly, the RTX 5080 handles games flawlessly from what I’ve tested. Like Cyberpunk at 4K with path tracing on—on my old graphics card, I’d get 1 FPS basically. This card couldn’t handle it. But actually, my RTX 5080 handles it with no issue at all.

Yes, you would need DLSS, obviously, if everything was completely maxed out. But in general, my RTX 5080 handles that really well on both of my systems. One of them has a Ryzen 5900X CPU, and the other one has a 7600 CPU, so no 3D gaming chips or anything like that. But both actually handle gaming really well when paired with the RTX 5080, so I’ve been really impressed with that—other than when it comes to Cyberpunk, because that is just crashing left, right, and center.

Driver Bugs And Cyberpunk Rant

I literally can’t play it for more than 5 or 10 minutes before it crashes.

Actually, yesterday I was trying to film a video talking about something, and Cyberpunk kept crashing over and over. I do understand the irony that I’ve been talking about how amazing the card is for content creation, but yet it keeps crashing when I’m actually using it for content creation and playing Cyberpunk. So I do understand that. If you look at the Nvidia forums, it’s full of people complaining about both the driver and the hotfix, saying that they’re just getting loads of game crashes, which is a complete pain.

But what I have found, at least for me, is this: it’s only Cyberpunk that I’m having issues with. I can play Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemption 2, and loads of other games with no crashes, so it just seems to be Cyberpunk for now, which is a pity because actually, that was the main game I wanted to play when I got my new graphics card. Hopefully, that’ll be fixed soon, and then I can dive back into ray tracing overdrive goodness, because the game looks absolutely stunning.

So… Is It Any Good?

Of course, not everything is rosy in the RTX 50 series land, especially with this card, the RTX 5080, because it only has 16 gigs of VRAM. If you were going to go out and buy like a ROG Strix that’s £5,000 in the UK and a similar amount in the US, that is completely bonkers to actually pay for a 16 GB VRAM card. But certainly, if you look at the card in isolation—the RTX 5080—and you’re able to get it for close to MSRP, I actually think it’s a pretty damn good deal.

I do understand, though, that it’s a complete pain. There’s out-of-stock everywhere. The price at the moment is ridiculous if you do want a board partner card, and we don’t know when the Founders Edition ones will next be in stock if you did want to try and get an MSRP one. So the whole launch is completely annoying right now, but that’s kind of why I wanted to do this mini-review. Overall, I’m actually fairly happy with the card, and obviously, I was able to buy one. I just got lucky—it literally, the “add to basket” link came up on the website, so I got completely lucky.

But overall, I think this is a pretty damn good card if you can get it for MSRP or close to MSRP. I mean, it handles everything I’ve thrown at it with complete ease, and certainly for content creation, I think it’s especially good. That’s a point I’m going to come back to in future videos when I do a more full review of this particular card.

For now, that wraps up this mini-review. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know down in the comments. Other than that, thank you for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, please click the thumbs-up button, and please subscribe to see more videos like this.

Thanks for watching.