There is an unfortunate irony in the world of PC games at this time. As soon as AMD decided Grant the bad battle to NvidiaTeam Green presented what could be its most disappointing flagship offer in a decade in the form of RTX 5080.
Each generation, we talk about the dynamics between AMD and NVIDIA. And for almost a decade, there has been a linear progression between the two brands. AMD originally focused on the budget offers to undermine the main range of Nvidia, but slowly built each generation to eventually dispute what Nvidia could do at the flagship level. We have two generations of a true individual battle between AMD and NVIDIA. And just when AMD was about to get an advantage, he decided to fall for counting.
A step back
There is a historical context that is important here. In the early 2000s, Ati and Nvidia gave it to the supremacy of GPU, but that changed towards the end of the decade. AMD bought AI in 2006, and by 2010, they rubbed the name ATI completely. He continued fighting Nvidia at the upper end, but that slowly transformed into the years.
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In 2013, Nvidia launched the first titan card, consolidating as a performance leader. He continued doing it during the next two generations, and when AMD finally launched its offers of Polaris and Vega, a narrative was already in its place. AMD offered better value for money, but if you were only after gross performance, it was Nvidia’s game.
AMD reached a restart in 2019 with the first RDNA architecture. Instead of focusing on the upper end where it would lose the offers of the NVIDIA RTX 20 series, it focused on medium range graphics cards. And it worked. For the RDNA 2 generation, AMD was able to play NVIDIA RTX 3090 with its own RX 6900 XT. But then Nvidia returned to the tip of a titan style, and it seems that AMD bent down to return to her Navi Play Book.
Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 TIOnce again, cementing it at the top of the performance lists. AMD counted with the RX 6950 XTBut it was too late. Then, in the next generation, AMD once again got balance with its flagship RX 7900 XTXBut once again, Nvidia was one step ahead. RX 7900 XTX could compete with RTX 4080, but the harvest cream RTX 4090 It was left without opposition. They have turned rumors about an RTX 4090 TI, which would not surprise me if Nvidia left in the tank in case AMD took the fight to the flagship level once again.
In at least in the last decade, it seems that AMD has always obtained the short end of the stick. GCN graphics cards were powerful and popular, but they were the objective of cryptocurrency miners, which made them difficult to get. Vega offered flagship performance, but to the crazy energy demands compared to NVIDIA. And more recently, I could obtain a maximum 4K yield with RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 offers, but I would have to give up the power line power and the NVIDIA DLS.
It always seems that AMD is just a small step behind Nvidia, so I understand why the company wanted to restart as it did with Navi. It is a pity that the restart arrives when Nvidia decided to publish a particularly disappointing generation of GPU.
You miss the shots you don’t take
Very good, now we return to RTX 5080. It is a very strange GPU to evaluate, but I will try to paint an image of because It is disappointing. To start, the card is half the price of RTX 5090, but it comes with approximately 70% of the yield. That inherently means that it is a better value, but I recommended the most expensive card in me RTX 5090 review. I do not recommend RTX 5080, at least for most people. That may seem a contradiction, but it is not. It is a paradox.
When talking about cards like Titan, and now, RTX 5090, the price does not matter. He simply does not. These GPUs serve to put Nvidia at the top of the performance battery, and there are a group of devotee users who will pay any price that Nvidia slaps in the box, regardless of the impression you can get from YouTube comments and threads of Reddit. They can squeeze their teeth. They can overcome their bank account. But they will buy the best simply because it is the best.
That standard does not apply to RTX 5080, not only because it is $ 1,000 less than the RTX 5090, but also because it is not the best. The value plays a much more important role, and Nvidia dropped the ball on that forehead. The RTX 5080 is slower than RTX 4090, and is only 18% faster than RTX 4080 Super. For the context, the RTX 4080 base was about 30% faster than RTX 3090, and RTX 3080 was approximately 30% faster than RTX 2080 TI. We are talking about a deficit of about 50% compared to what NVIDIA delivered in previous generations.
Gross performance can be the Nvidia game. But the value is AMD, and PC players desperately need a bit of value at this time.
This is, or at least it would be the perfect time for an AMD flagship that could bring the fight to the offer of 80 Nvidia classes. Nvidia can try to get the advantage by releasing something more powerful or lowering the price of RTX 5080, but PC players finally win in that situation. But we are not obtaining an AMD flagship this generation. If you have $ 1,000 to record on a 4K graphics card, RTX 5080 is your best option. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
I suspect that we will obtain a battle focused on the value below the pile with the RTX 5070 of NVIDIA and the RX 9070 XT of AMD, but it will probably be a repetition of what we have seen in past generations. AMD offers better value, but Nvidia claims a top slot with Features such as DLSS 4. I am not supporting a team or another here, but there is an sobering reality that the multitude of PC games will have to take into account sooner or later. If no one can play NVIDIA, the quality of the hardware will decrease rapidly.
