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Nvidia RTX 5080 Ray Tracing Gaming Performance
Nvidia was the driving force behind the creation of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and related APIs like Vulkan Ray Tracing. It all started with the Turing RTX 20-series GPUs, with each subsequent generation doubling the ray/triangle intersection calculation rates (per RT core).
Not surprisingly, most RT games end up being better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, because Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We've selected six reasonably demanding RT games for our testing, and we'll have additional supplemental RT / full RT / DLSS 4 testing on the next page.
The RTX 5080, again, doesn't offer much compared to the prior generation in our DirectX Raytracing (DXR) test suite. Control ends up being the best result, mostly, with 16% higher performance at 4K. But Minecraft has a bug right now where performance on the RTX 5090 and 5080 is basically all kinds of messed up. That drags down the overall result.
Toss Minecraft out of the equation, for now, and the 5080 sees a 10% performance improvement over the 4080 Super at 4K, 8% at 1440p, and 7% at 1080p ultra — but only 3% at 1080p medium. Basically, you want to be gaming at 1440p or 4K before a GPU like the 5080 makes much sense.
Looking at AMD's RX 7900 XTX, which will likely remain the fastest GPU from Team Red for at least the next year based on what we're hearing about RDNA4 GPUs, it's no surprise that the 5080 easily beats AMD's fastest solution. Even Minecraft is mostly faster (1080p "ultra" was slower), and overall, the 5080 delivers roughly 25–45 percent higher ray tracing performance than the 7900 XTX.
Outside Minecraft, most of these games still only do modest amounts of RT. We'll check some full RT games on the next page as well to see if the Blackwell GPUs see larger gains.
Here are the combined rasterization plus ray tracing overall results charts. These charts use the geomean of all 22 games we tested, with RT accounting for slightly more than a quarter of the overall score.
There are a few games where performance on the 5080 and 5090 looks to be off, due to the new architecture and need for further driver tuning. As with the RT result above, those games drag down the overall average a bit, especially at 1080p.
The RTX 5080 ends up 8.5% ahead of the 4080 Super at 4K, 5.2% faster at 1440p, tied at 1080p ultra, and 2.4% faster at 1080p medium. If we discount the problematic Minecraft (the worst offender for driver bugs right now), the overall delta improves by 1–3 percent at the various resolutions.
AMD's 7900 XTX fared better in the rasterization testing, so the 5080 only leads by 10–20 percent in our overall metric.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections, in general, don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects. What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games.
Still, since there's RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite. Note also how the AMD 7900 XTX lags behind the 4080 Super across all tested resolutions and settings — a key giveaway is that this (AMD-promoted) game uses ray tracing.
If you want a game where ray tracing is both clearly visible and actually makes the game look better, without totally destroying performance, look no further than Control. It's now five years old, and we're using the Ultimate version, but it's still arguably the best example of using RT well. And probably a lot of that is because you're running around the Federal Bureau of Control, an office space of sorts that has good reasons to have plenty of glass windows that reflect the scenery.
The RTX 5080 has some rendering errors in Control right now, and there's a hard 240 FPS cap that impacts the 1080p results. But the 1440p and 4K results are valid across all the GPUs we've tested here, with the 5080 beating the 4080 Super by about 15%.
Possibly the most hyped-up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later, the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so, as with upscaling, it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.
We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off. However, we'll have more details on Cyberpunk 2077 with RT-Overdrive on the next page. It's also currently the only game with a public release that supports DLSS 4.
F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing. We use the Great Britain track for testing, in the rain naturally.
Minecraft supports full path tracing, as well as DLSS 2 upscaling on RTX cards. We don't enable DLSS, and the game doesn't even allow it on the RTX 50-series GPUs right now. Apparently, it has some sort of hard-coded check for an RTX 20-, 30-, or 40-series GPU is our best guess. Or it's just a driver bug of some form.
Both the 5080 and 5090 underperform in Minecraft by quite a lot — especially at 1080p. Nvidia is working on a fix, which will hopefully be in the first public driver when the cards launch tomorrow.
Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxing out the settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM. The 16GB cards, like the RTX 5080, have no issues.
One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor-agnostic fashion. Except, in this case, it appears to need further tuning (or driver tweaks) to run well on Blackwell GPUs. The 5080 barely beats the 7900 XTX right now, and the 5090 lands below the 4090. That's not supposed to happen, so clearly, some bug fixing needs to be done.
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