The Nvidia RTX 50-series is one of the most controversial graphics card launches in many years, but that doesn’t stop the top cards being some of the best you can buy — if you can find them at a fair price. Two of the top options worth considering are the RTX 5080 and 5070 Ti: two powerful GPUs with lots of fast memory, plenty of CUDA cores, and the latest generations of RT and tensor cores.
But how do these two cards stack up? With prices flying wild, here’s how to nail down which graphics card is best for you.
Both the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti are technically available in that they have both been officially launched and have their recommended retail prices: $1,000 and $750, respectively. However, those aren’t realistic, as third-parties control pricing for the 5070 Ti, and have vastly outstripped it; The ongoing Trump tariffs are driving prices higher across the board, too.
Stock levels are almost non-existent due to ongoing production problems — leading some cards to ship without the right internal hardware – so pricing has gone completely bananas, on top of the manufacturer-mandated price rises.
At the time of writing, the RTX 5070 Ti is sometimes available for around $800, but you’re much more likely to find one at around $1,000. The RTX 5080 is going for as much as $2,000, but you can sometimes find them between $1,400 and $1,800.
The on-paper differences between these two graphics cards are relatively minor, giving us our first glimpse of what is in actuality, quite close real-world performance. The RTX 5080 has 20% more CUDA cores, RT cores, and Tensor cores, but at roughly the same clock speeds. Memory quantities are the same, with only the slightly faster speed of the GDDR7 making a real difference to the overall bandwidth — and even then, it’s minor.
Wattage demands aren’t insignificant, but 13% isn’t anything crazy. If you have a PSU that’s capable of handling the RTX 5070 Ti, it’ll almost certainly be enough for the 5080, t00.
We tested the RTX 5080 when it first debuted, and found it a very capable graphics card — albeit one that falls behind both the RTX 5090 and RTX 4090, by enough of a margin that 4090 owners must be very happy with their last-gen purchase.
Although we haven’t had a chance to test the RTX 5070 Ti, yet, it’s an easy one to compare, because it’s about as powerful as an RTX 4080 Super. In fact, the 4080 Super is slightly faster in some cases, though the added multi frame gen support with the RTX 50-series does give it an advantage in certain games.
The 7900 XTX isn’t a bad analogy for the 5070 Ti in non-RT games, but when ray tracing is turned on the AMD cards fall far behind, so it’s not a universal analog.
In Nvidia’s own graphs, it claimed that the 5070 Ti was around 20% faster than the 4070 Ti (non-Super) which kind of works out in the wider third-party testing.
Although the RTX 5080 is the stronger card, it only works out around 10-15% faster than the 5070 Ti and it does it while demanding more power, and with a price that’s at least 50% higher.
In a normal graphics card generation where there’s some immediate competition from AMD at every price point and the last-generation is still in stock, we’d almost certainly be suggesting you avoid the RTX 50-series — and indeed, until prices calm down, you should probably still do so. But it’s not a normal GPU generation. It’s one of the most catastrophic we’ve seen in years.
But! If you’re going to buy one of these cards, where should you put your money? It’s pretty obvious: The RTX 5070 Ti. It’s not a great card when compared to the year-old, last-generation 4070 Ti Super, but it is faster. It’s not as fast as the 5080, but it’s pretty close (especially with overclocking) and you can often find it for close to two thirds of the price. That’s huge.
It just isn’t worth spending $500+ more on a 5080 to maybe get 10% added performance.
But better yet? Wait out either of these cards. Wait for stock to resume, prices to come down, and AMD to offer an alternative that might encourage Nvidia to correct course and make its cards more affordable and more capable for the money it’s demanding. A boy can dream.
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