Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition Review: 13% gains over the RX 7900 XTX for 30% increased pricing over the RTX 5080 FE

Asus has made an interesting move this year by expanding its traditionally mid-range focused Prime series to include the flagship RTX 5080. The Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition seeks to be a capable alternative to Nvidia's own RTX 5080 Founders Edition.

The Prime RTX 5080 OC sports a minimalist yet functional design that occupies just 2.5 slots making it ideal for small form factor (SFF) builds.

In terms of raw performance, the Prime RTX 5080 OC Edition delivers a modest 2-3% improvement over the RTX 5080 FE in both synthetic benchmarks and real-world gaming scenarios.

The uplift over the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is more tangible, in the realm of 10-13% depending on the benchmark or game.

The Prime RTX 5080 OC also benefits from Nvidia's much vaunted software stack, and the card fully supports the latest DLSS 4 multi-frame generation capabilities of the Blackwell architecture.

The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition can be had from Amazon and Best Buy US for $1,319.99, but the card is currently sold out at the time of writing.

In India, the Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC is officially priced at ₹1,59,999 and comes with a three-year warranty, but it currently retails at a higher markup at local retailers.

Although the RTX 5080 Founders Edition (FE) may be difficult to obtain, there is no dearth of add-in board (AiB) partner cards on the market. Asus offers the RTX 50 Series GPUs under ROG, TUF Gaming, and Prime categories.

The Prime series is designed for small form factor (SFF) PC builds. It was first introduced with the RTX 40 Series lineup but was only limited to the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 GPUs and their revisions. This year, Asus has expanded the Prime series to include the RTX 5080.

We recently reviewed the Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5080 OC. In this review, we will take a look at the Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition and see how it fares in comparison with the RTX 5080 FE.

Measuring 304 x 126 x 50 mm, the Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC is slightly thicker than the RTX 5080 FE. However, it remains an SFF card, occupying just 2.5 slots.

The front shroud is made of high-quality plastic, though we would have liked it to be sturdier, and it is complemented by a metal backplate.

The "GeForce RTX" and "PRIME" logos are prominently displayed on the front shroud, but there's no RGB of any kind around these.

We used the following components in our current test bench:

• Cooler Master MasterFrame 700 open test bench
• Intel Core i9-14900K with Intel Extreme profile set in the BIOS
• Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gen4 2 TB NVMe SSD and 2x Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA SSDs for OS, benchmarks, and games
• 2x 16 GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 RAM with timings 32-39-39-80 at 1.40 V
• Alienware AW3225QF 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor
• Thermaltake TH420 V2 Ultra EX ARGB AiO cooler
• Cooler Master MVE Gold V2 1250 ATX 3.0 fully modular PSU

Windows 11 24H2 with the latest patches, together with Nvidia Game Ready Driver version 572.16 issued to the press was used.

We would like to thank Cooler Master for supplying the test bench and PSU, Gigabyte for the motherboard, Sabrent for the SSD, Dell for the Alienware monitor, Thermaltake for the AiO cooler, Kingston for the DDR5 memory kit, and finally Asus for the Prime RTX 5080 Gaming OC Edition GPU.

The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition performs more or less similar to the RTX 5080 FE in synthetic benchmarks. The marginally higher boosts translate to only a 2% advantage in cumulative 3DMark and Unigine tests.

Meanwhile, the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XTX manages a 4% gain over the Prime RTX 5080 OC in 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics but gets clobbered in Port Royal and Speed Way tests that involve ray tracing.

Once again, the Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC manages a hair's breadth lead over the RTX 5080 FE in the MLPerf AI benchmark.

Both the Prime RTX 5080 OC and the RTX 5080 FE take equal time to finish Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA and Classroom Optix renders while showing no practical difference in V-Ray tests.

AMD cards are at an obvious disadvantage in CUDA and RTX benchmarks, but the Radeon RX 7900 XTX manages to beat both the RTX 5080 models in a certain ComputeMark subtests.

The Prime GeForce RTX 5080 OC Edition is only ahead of the RTX 5080 FE by the slenderest of margins in cumulative gaming tests at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra, while outperforming the Radeon RX 7900 XTX by 13% overall.

The biggest lead from the RX 7900 XTX comes from F1 24 at 4K Ultra, where the Prime RTX 5080 OC is 47% faster.

Interestingly, Alan Wake 2 sees the flagship RDNA 3 GPU showing up to 12% gains over the Prime RTX 5080 OC and up to 18% leads over the RTX 5080 FE.

Overall, the Prime RTX 5080 OC doesn't struggle to hit and even cross the 4K 60 fps mark without upscaling help in Ultra settings in a good number of modern AAA titles.

The RX 7900 XTX's leads in Alan Wake 2 raster cannot be carried forward into ray tracing settings, where it trails the Prime RTX 5080 OC by 47% in 4K.

In Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, the Prime RTX 5080 OC puts up a whopping 58% lead over the RX 7900 XTX. However, the gains coming from the RTX 5080 FE are rather miniscule.

The 16 GB GDDR7 VRAM in the RTX 5080 is 30% faster than the GDDR6X equivalent in the RTX 4080 Super. However, this can prove to be a major limitation in certain settings in modern AAA titles.

For instance, it is impossible to even navigate the menus, let alone play the game, in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle when full path tracing is enabled at 4K. Enabling DLSS and frame generation doesn't help either.

Only a handful of titles currently support DLSS 4 multi-frame generation (MFG) out of the box. However, many other supported games can utilize DLSS 4 (for all RTX GPUs) and MFG (for Blackwell GPUs only) through overrides in the Nvidia app

Compared to Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, Star Wars Outlaws shows 5-7% gains on the Prime RTX 5080 OC over the RTX 5080 FE with DLSS and frame generation enabled.

Curiously, we noticed an anomalous result in Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty with MFG 2x enabled in the 4K Ray Tracing Overdrive preset, wherein the Prime RTX 5080 OC performed 31% slower than the RTX 5080 FE.

Despite double-checking that the settings, driver, and OS version were identical for both tests, Asus's card unexpectedly falls behind.