Introduction

Zotac GeForce RTX 5080 AMP Extreme Infinity is the company's most premium custom design variant of the latest enthusiast segment GPU from NVIDIA. The new RTX 5080 may be the generation's second-fastest GPU after last week's flagship RTX 5090, but it's designed for the same gaming tier—4K Ultra HD with maxed out settings, and ray tracing enabled. With the RTX 50-series, Zotac is introducing the new AMP Extreme Infinity design language. This is Zotac's most cyberpunk-looking design, with titanium finish surfaces, contrasting black accents, and series of ridges and vents executed neatly. Zotac knows that with the advent of pillarless all-glass cases, the tail-end and rear-left corner catches more attention from the user, and so the tail-end is finished with its own RGB illuminated surface and Zotac Gaming logo. A large RGB LED diffuser runs along the top-front edge of the card, which looks stunning when the card is installed in a vertical slot.



The GeForce RTX 5080 is powered by the new Blackwell graphics architecture that introduces a revolutionary new concept to consumer 3D graphics, called Neural Rendering. You already know the incredible power of generative AI in creating photorealistic images and video, and so does NVIDIA. The company figured out a way to integrate a generative AI model into the 3D rendering stack, so certain objects created by it are combined with conventional raster 3D graphics the way certain ray traced objects are. AI hence plays a more crucial part of the rendering, and isn't just relegated to reconstructing detail in DLSS super resolution. Speaking of which, the new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation are equally important updates. DLSS 4 introduces a new Transformer-based AI model replacing the CNN-based one, which provides greater accuracy, translating to improved image quality for super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame generation. With Blackwell, NVIDIA discovered a way to generate up to 4 successive frames to a conventionally rendered one, more than quadrupling the effective frame rate.

The new Blackwell generation SM introduces concurrent FP32 and INT32 execution on all its CUDA cores. The previous Ada generation SM only had half its cores capable of INT32. The shader execution reordering engine supports neural shaders. NVIDIA created a way for 3D applications to directly access Tensor cores, and worked with Microsoft to standardize it at the API level. The new 5th Generation Tensor core adds support for FP4 data formats, increasing throughput by tracing in precision. The 4th Generation RT core has added hardware for Mega Geometry, the ability to give ray traced object exponentially higher poly counts, and for all those added surfaces to accurately interact with rays.

With Blackwell, NVIDIA held on to the same exact foundry node it built Ada on, going all the way back to 2022. Dubbed the NVIDIA 4N, this is a specialized node based on TSMC 5 nm EUV, with NVIDIA-specific enhancements. Since the node hasn't changed, all generational performance-per-Watt increases you see are squarely functions of the new graphics architecture, and updates to the power management system NVIDIA introduced with it.

The GeForce RTX 5080 is based on the new GB203 silicon, which it maxes out, enabling all 84 SM present on the silicon, besides its full 256-bit wide GDDR7 memory interface, and 64 MB of on-die L2 cache. These 84 SM work out to 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, 84 RT cores, 336 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. NVIDIA runs the GPU at speeds of 2617 MHz reference, which Zotac overclocked further. The memory ticks at a cool 30 Gbps, generating 960 GB/s of memory bandwidth on tap, which is a 34% increase over that of the RTX 4080. The increased reliance on AI makes this bandwidth increase worth the effort and cost.

The Zotac RTX 5080 AMP Extreme Infinity debuts the 3rd generation of Zotac's IceStorm cooling solution. It features a large vapor chamber pulling heat from the GPU and memory, which pushes heat to a 3.5-slot tall aluminium fin-stack heatsink over a network of heat pipes. Zotac's new BladeLink fans feature webbed impellers for maximum axial airflow. The new Spectra 2.0 lighting system consists of a large RGB diffuser along the top edge, and a second lighting setup at the tail end of the card. The card comes with factory overclocked speeds of 2670 MHz (vs. 2617 MHz reference). The memory is left untouched at 30 Gbps. Zotac is pricing the card at $1250, a 25% premium over the NVIDIA baseline price.