Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC, I want to keep an eye on how it compares to the stock RTX 5080 Founders Edition, in addition to that we will keep an eye on the RTX 4080, RTX 4080 SUPER, and the RTX 4090 from Nvidia and the RX 7900 XTX from AMD. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC is overclocked and has a clock speed of 2730 MHz which is 113 MHz faster than stock. Not a significant overclock but with a much larger cooler MSI can also be more aggressive on their power profile so it will be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC scored 81836 compared to the Founder Editions 79045 in the base Fire Strike which is a 3.5% increase and pushed it up just a hair past the RTX 4090. In Fire Stike Extreme it didn’t pass the 4090 but did get a 5.1% increase in performance. For the Fire Strike Ultra test the improvement was smaller but still noticeable, going up 2.4% from 21262 up to 21777.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In the base Time Spy test, the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC scored 33379 which was 2.2% over the Founders Edition with its 32642 score. This was still well below the RTX 4090 but 9.7% over the 7900 XTX and 17% over the 4080 SUPER. For Time Spy Extreme the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC scored a 16961, 4.4% over the stock RTX 5080 but still well behind the 4090.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC improved on the RTX 5080 Founder Edition’s performance by 1.4% in Speed Way, widening the gap between both cards and the RTX 4080 SUPER. Port Royal was similar with the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC improving by 1.6% on the stock-clocked Founders Edition 5080 and is 24% over the RTX 4080 SUPER.
I also ran the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC improved on the 5080 Fes numbers by 1.9% here, once again both cards are sitting with a big gap between the RTX 4090 above them and a big gap between the RTX 4080 SUPER which sits below them.
Last up I did check out the DLSS performance on the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC. For this, I ran the DLSS test in 3Dmark and I ran all four versions of DLSS on the cards that were capable of it. This gives a great look at the performance improvement that DLSS is capable of and is an example of why DLSS 4 is such a big deal for the new 50 Series cards which are the only cards that support Frame Generation x3 and x4. For the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC, you see the base frame rate was 49.98, and using DLSS 1 improved that up to 89.83. DLSS kicked it up to 123.9 and DLSS 3 up to 171.54. That in itself is impressive but DLSS 4 then blows our chart up increasing the performance up to 299.91 FPS. This is a synthetic benchmark and because there isn’t any variance where you are moving around it is a best-case scenario, but a 500% improvement is crazy. Not to mention the new Transformer based models have improved the visual quality where DLSS 4 performance looks better than the older DLSS 3 quality settings.
