NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB
Second-fastest Blackwell GPU — 16GB GDDR7 at a third of the RTX 5090's price, the 1% tier's fallback card.
Specifications
| Brand | NVIDIA |
| Dlss | true |
| Fsr | true |
| Launch Year | 2025 |
| Model | GeForce RTX 5080 |
| Ray Tracing | true |
| Recommended Psu Watts | 850 |
| Tdp Watts | 360 |
| Vram Gb | 16 |
| Vram Type | GDDR7 |
Appears in These Builds
The 1% Build — June 2026 alternative
~$7434No price ceiling — ~$7,434 of the fastest silicon money can buy for 4K Ultra with path tracing and zero compromises.
The Fallback When the RTX 5090 Isn’t Buyable
The RTX 5080 is the card you buy when the 5090 is out of stock or its price has drifted past what any amount of enthusiasm justifies. It is a genuine step down — roughly two-thirds of the 5090’s shader count and 16GB of GDDR7 against 32GB — and this page does not pretend otherwise. At 4K with path tracing enabled, that gap shows.
What it has going for it is the price. The 5090 has spent 2026 trading far above its notional list price; the 5080 sits near a third of it. For 4K Ultra with DLSS 4 in everything on this site, the 5080 is comfortable, and the 16GB frame buffer is enough for current titles at that resolution. Where the 5090 earns its money is native 4K path tracing and non-gaming work with large models, which is exactly the workload most buyers of a 1% build never actually run.
It appears as the alternative in our 1% build. If the 5090 is available at a sane price and the budget genuinely has no ceiling, the 5090 is still the faster card — this is the pick when it isn’t.