Our first GeForce RTX 5080 laptop benchmarks are in and results are roughly 10 percent slower than the mobile RTX 5090

Laptops sporting Blackwell GPUs are beginning to hit the market just as promised by manufacturers. Now that the top-end mobile RTX 5090 has been widely benchmarked, it's time to move one step down to see how the mobile RTX 5080 compares. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the performance delta between the mobile RTX 5080 and mobile RTX 5090 is almost identical to the delta between the mobile RTX 4080 and mobile RTX 4090.

3DMark benchmarks between our two Schenker Neo 16 test units with otherwise identical Ryzen 9 9955HX processors show that the RTX 5080 unit is roughly 10 to 15 percent slower than its pricier sibling. This deficit translates fairly well when running actual games like Baldur's Gate 3, Final Fantasy XV, Alan Wake 2, or Assassin's Creed Shadows. As usual, the deficit is widest when running at 4K resolutions on demanding games and smallest when running at lower resolutions where graphics become less GPU bound.

A notable observation is that the performance gap between the mobile RTX 5080 and mobile RTX 5090 would remain the same whether or not DLSS is enabled. When running Assassin's Creed Shadows with DLSS on, for example, the mobile RTX 5090 would maintain its 15 percent lead over the mobile RTX 5080.

The relatively small performance drop between the two enthusiast GPUs means it may be worth configuring laptops with the RTX 5080 instead of the RTX 5090 to save on hundreds of dollars or for better performance-per-dollar.