ZOTAC started teasing a refresh of its Apocalypse product line earlier in the year. Two months later, fairly concrete details of the (still) upcoming GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB variant emerged via the NVIDIA board partner's Weibo blog. Unfortunately, ZOTAC's ultra premium 3.5-slot thick/ARGB-lit behemoth design is expected to remain exclusive to the Chinese PC hardware market. Western hardcore gaming enthusiasts are best served by the manufacturer's alternative flagship triple-slotter: GeForce RTX 5080 AMP Extreme INFINITY ULTRA. ZOTAC's mainland China and Hong Kong offices have declared the arrival of brand-new Apocalypse SKUs at retail; utilizing NVIDIA's "Blackwell" GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs.

Yesterday's Weibo bulletin commenced with: "when mecha aesthetics collide with technology, and gaming passion merges with extreme performance, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 50 Apocalypse series graphics cards are born! After (our) continuous R&D, improvement, testing and adjustment—today, newly upgraded flagship graphics cards are officially launched!" The brand has advertised the return of an apparently much-missed product line mascot: "Apocalypse Princess is back with a new look, starting a game/AI exploration journey with you." Promotional imagery and box art feature a prominent illustration of ZOTAC's flagship series heroine—this "mecha artwork" demonstrates a serious sci-fi aesthetic, albeit with a cute female protagonist leading the way. A rival AIB specializes in this type of "marketing"—Yeston's similar-ish presentation language concentrates on enchanting fantasy characters.ZOTAC's latest Chinese market exclusives are available now, with: "(a) pleasing appearance and powerful performance." In particular, selective binning has placed their new flagship in an elite position. As explained in the company's freshly published press release: "the core of each RTX 5080 Apocalypse series graphics card has been carefully selected and tested multiple times. Not only is the factory frequency much higher than ordinary graphics cards, but the overclocking potential is huge. It has strict standards and is specially designed for performance enthusiasts!"A boastful section stated: "among them, the core factory frequency of our GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB Apocalypse OC graphics card is: 2295-2730 MHz, and the core factory frequency of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16 GB Apocalypse OC model is: 2295-2572 MHz—both of which are much higher than the frequency of (other) public version graphics cards." An Ice Core 2.0 cooling system consists of three newly formulated 10 cm "large-size" ring blade fans, eight 8 mm diameter Ice Pulse 3.0 composite material heat pipes, and a 3-slot thick nickel-plated dense cooling fin array. ZOTAC reckons that the Apocalypse's "large-area VC heat spreader" fully covers a card's GPU core and VRAM modules.