Yesterday I took a look at Nvidia’s RTX 5080 Founders Edition and today both the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 hit stores. Along with the sale embargo, we can finally take a look at the overclocked aftermarket cards as well. MSI has a wide variety of RTX 5080 card designs, with 21 different SKUs. Some of those are different variations on product lines that we have seen MSI have in the past like the Shadow line, Gaming Trio, Ventus, and my favorite, the Suprim lineup. There were two new lines though with the Inspire line and the Vanguard line. MSI ended up sending over their RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC in the Launch Edition packaging so we get a chance to see what that new lineup is all about. Let’s dive in and see what features the card has, how it performs, and how it compares with the Founders Edition as well.
Product Name: MSI RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC Launch Edition
Review Sample Provided by: MSI
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is new?
Nvidia announced a lot with this one so let’s try to touch on as much as we can. They of course had a few hardware announcements for the 50-Series. They have announced four cards, the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 Ti, and the RTX 5070. That is the new 50-series RTX family. The slides below include their focus on them. The 5090 for example is targeted at 4k 240 Hz and the other three are targeted at 2k or 1440p performance. They all have GDDR7 VRAM with the flagship RTX 5090 having 32 GB and a 512-bit interface. The RTX 5080 cuts that in half to 16 GB, the RTX 5070 Ti also has 16GB, and then the RTX 5070 has 12 GB.
The new GPUs are based on the Blackwell architecture and they do have new updated RT and Tensor cores with that being the 4th gen for the RT Cores and 5th gen for Tensor cores. The new tensor cores can now also handle floating point (FP) 4 along with FP8 and FP16. They also have introduced an AMP processer which is the AI Management Processor to help schedule AI tasks alongside of graphics rendering. They have increased the number of NV encoders and decoders, it now depends on the card model and isn’t a flat number of them across the entire generation of cards. They have also moved to PCIe Gen 5 and DisplayPort 2.1b including UHBR20. For pricing the RTX 5090 comes in at $1999, the RTX 5090 is half that (just like its memory) at $999. The RTX 5070 Ti is $749 and the RTX 5070 is $549.
Some of the main goals with Blackwell were to optimize the neural workloads and reduce the memory footprint. No big surprises there. Memory is one of the more expensive parts of the cards and anyone who has been paying attention knows that neural workloads and AI have been where Nvidia has been seeing the biggest improvements. Combining those things they have brought AI into shaders with neural shaders. The example of this they show is a hair being rendered with ray tracing and how using spheres rather than triangles helps use less data which means less VRAM and higher frame rates.
Nvidia announced Transformer which replaces CNN as the model they use with Super Resolution. They have improved the design significantly to get better detail when scaling this up. On top of that, they announced DLSS 4 which has improved on the frame generation that they introduced with DLSS 3. It is now Multi Frame Generation. Where before they were able to generate every other frame, they can now do x3 or x4. This gets interesting once they add in DLSS Super Resolution as well because that is already rendering ¾ of the image. With both, they are rendering 15 of 16 pixels using AI. Of course how well this works then depends a lot on how good the renders are. But it gives huge improvements in performance and with frame generation, we know that those improvements still happen even if you are PCU limited for example. The example they show has DLSS off at 27 FPS, turning on Super Resolution it goes to 71 FPS. DLSS 3.5 gets you to 140 FPS and DLSS 4 is 248 FPS. DLSS is already supported by a LOT of games and Nvidia is saying that DLSS 4 will have 75 games and apps supporting DLSS 4 at Day 0. Some of those will be by using the Nvidia App, which can override the DLSS settings on some games. It is also important to note that some of these features will go back and work with legacy cards as well. Specifically, DLAA is going to work back to the 20 series of cards, same with the improved DLSS Super Resolution. The new multi-frame generation however only works with 50 series cards.
They also introduced a new Nvidia Reflex. Reflex helps improve responsiveness to get lower latency through the entire pipeline. Were Reflex offered 50% faster responsiveness the new Reflex 2 gets you 75% by using frame warp. They say that is coming first to 50 series and will be available in games like Valorant soon.
Below I have the specifications for the RTX 5090 as well as the last two xx90 cards. We can see that the number of GPCs hasn’t changed from the 4090 to the 5090 but they did increase the SMs from 128 to 170. The CUDA core SM count is still the same but there are now 21760 CUDA cores to the previous 16384, a 32% increase. We still have 4 Tensor SMs but the new 5th gen design has 680 cores now. For clock speed, the RTX 5090 is set lower than the RTX 4090 with a clock speed of 2407 MHz. There are 32% more RT cores which is a 32$ increase but the RT FLOPS has jumped up 66% with the new RT design. The memory has increased from 24 GB up to 32GB and it now uses GDDR7. They have also increased the memory interface up to 512-bit from 384-bit which the 3090 and 4090 both had. The memory data rate has gone from 21 Gbps up to 28 Gbps and the bandwidth increased with that and the larger pipeline from 1008 GB/sec up to 1792 GB/sec a 77% increase. The cache has increased in side with the L1 cache going from 16384 KB up to 21760 KB and the L2 increasing as well from 73728 KB up to 98304 KB. The TGP also had a big jump going from 450 watts on the RTX 4090 to 575 watts here on the RTX 5090. This is an even bigger gap when you include the RTX 3090 which was 350 watts. The manufacturing process is still the TSMC 4nm 4N process so no changes there I mentioned it earlier but all of the 50 series cards moved to PCIe gen 5 and the RTX 5090 is no different. For pricing, it has an MSRP of $1999 which is $400 more than the RTX 4090 but is similar to the RTX 3090 Ti which also launched at $1999 back in 2022.
Specifications |
|
Model Name |
G5080-16VGSL |
Graphics Processing Unit |
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5080 |
Interface |
PCI Express® Gen 5 |
Core Clocks |
Extreme Performance: 2745 MHz (MSI Center) Boost: 2730 MHz (GAMING & SILENT Mode) |
CUDA Cores |
10752 Units |
Memory Speed |
30 Gbps |
Memory |
16GB GDDR7 |
Memory Bus |
256-bit |
Output |
DisplayPort x 3 (v2.1b) HDMI™ x 1 (As specified in HDMI™ 2.1b: up to 4K 480Hz or 8K 120Hz with DSC, Gaming VRR, HDR) |
HDCP Support |
Y |
Power consumption |
360W |
Power connectors |
16-pin x1 |
Recommended PSU |
850W |
Card Dimension (mm) |
357 x 151 x 66 mm |
Weight (Card / Package) |
1945 g / 3991 g |
DirectX Version Support |
12 Ultimate |
OpenGL Version Support |
4.6 |
Maximum Displays |
4 |
G-SYNC® technology |
Y |
Digital Maximum Resolution |
7680 x 4320 |
Before getting into testing I also ran GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The RTX 5080 Vanguard was clocked at 2730 MHz for our testing which matches the boost speed for both the gaming and silent BIOS modes for the card. It’s an overclock of 113 MHz over the Founders Edition. I tested the Vanguard using the same 572.02 Beta driver provided by Nvidia ahead of the launch to press.