The best argument for grabbing a 5080 right now, if you can find one at $999 in the first place, is that the only cards that come close to its performance are either way more expensive than they're supposed to be (the 4080 Super) or not cheap enough to justify the Nvidia-specific features you give up (AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX).

GeForce RTX 5080.The price level of $999 certainly sites better. Armed with 84 streaming multiprocessors and a total of 10,752 CUDA cores (roughly half the core count of the RTX 5090) it features a sleek two-slot design.

With its AI capabilities enabled, the RTX 5090 is the fastest and best-performing graphics card in the world. Can Nvidia's competitors catch up?

GPU maker NVIDIA has warned consumers that the stock of its forthcoming RTX 5090 and 5080 cards will be limited. Some gamers are even camping out to get one.

The Nvidia RTX 5080 cannot match up to the raw processing of a RTX 5080, but with multi frame gen it's a card you can't ignore.