Introduction

Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock OC is the company's premium custom design RTX 5080 product, with a focus not just on offering the company's best factory overclock, but also a splash of bright color in your gaming PC build. This card is best installed in a vertical slot, as its biggest design element is on the topside of the cooler shroud, in the form of a large acrylic RGB LED diffuser with an arrangement of lighting and curved diffuser elements. Last week, we reviewed the Palit RTX 5090 GameRock OC, and this card is visually identical. The new GeForce RTX 5080 is NVIDIA's second enthusiast-segment launch from the GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell generation. It is designed for maxed out AAA gaming at 4K Ultra HD, with ray tracing enabled. The card starts at a price point that's exactly half that of the RTX 5090, and many of its specs appear half that of the RTX 5090, however its gaming performance isn't half. Consider the RTX 5080 to be a distilled RTX 5090 focused on gaming and game streaming use-cases, where the RTX 5090 unlocks additional possibilities such as AI development, thanks to massive memory and bandwidth.



The GeForce Blackwell architecture introduces a revolutionary new concept in 3D graphics called neural rendering. You already know the immense potential generative AI has in creating photorealistic images and video. Imagine a generative AI model running in tandem with conventional rendering, creating certain objects and textures on the fly. NVIDIA figured out a way to get the GPU to accelerate generative AI models and graphics rendering in tandem, to achieve exactly this, thanks to the new AI management processor. The new Blackwell SM comes with concurrent FP32 and INT32 math capability on all its CUDA cores, the previous generation Ada SM only had INT32 capability on half of them. The new 5th Generation Tensor core supports FP4 data formats for more throughput in exchange for precision. The new 4th Generation RT core has more specialized hardware that paves the way for Mega Geometry, the ability for ray traced objects to have exponentially more poly counts—a big deal considering all those polygons have to interact with rays.

The new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation are other additions to the experience with Blackwell. DLSS 4 introduces a new Transformer-based AI model to drive all DLSS subcomponents, including super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame generation. Multi Frame Generation gives the GPU to create not just every other frame using AI, but up to 3 frames succeeding a conventionally rendered one, which means one conventionally rendered pixel spawns up to 15 other pixels, effectively quadrupling the frame rate in a best-case scenario.

The GeForce RTX 5080 debuts the new GB203 silicon, which has similar die-area and transistor counts to the AD103 powering the RTX 4080, this is because NVIDIA is building Blackwell on the same NVIDIA 4N process node which is derived from TSMC 5 nm EUV. The RTX 5080 maxes out the GB103, enabling all 84 SM physically present, which works out to 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, 84 RT cores, 336 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. The chip features a 256-bit wide GDDR7 memory bus driving 16 GB of memory, which runs at 30 Gbps, yielding 960 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a cool 34% increase over that of the RTX 4080. NVIDIA's new AI-accelerated technologies call for this bandwidth increase.

The Palit RTX 5080 GameRock OC debuts the company's latest generation of GameRock cooling solution, with a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by three fans, which uses a vapor chamber plate to pull heat from the GPU and memory. The front side surrounding the fan intakes is a design highlight of this card, and Palit calls it the Chameleon Panel. Palit has given the RTX 5080 GameRock OC a generous factory overclock of 2730 MHz boost compared to 2617 MHz reference. The card comes with dual-BIOS, and both BIOSes offer this speed. We couldn't get official pricing from Palit, but we're expecting a $1200 price point for the card.