As a professional PC builder and a full-time fantasy nerd, I needed a new graphics card to play the latest Kingdom Come medieval-combat game with the best image quality, and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 has risen to the call. I reviewed this graphics card earlier this year, handing it our Editors’ Choice laurels for its favorable price-for-performance ratio. After buying one back in June, it’s all mine, and I’ve been a happy gamer ever since.
Here’s how the RTX 5080 has handled some of my favorite PC games this year and why it should be on your short list for a high-end GPU going into the holiday shopping season. (And no, you should not get an RTX 5090.)
Why the RTX 5080 Is as High as You Should Go
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is the most powerful graphics card currently on the market that gamers should consider. Technically, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is more potent, but it’s also prohibitively expensive, costing twice as much as the RTX 5080 and not delivering nearly twice the performance. For the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090’s $1,999 asking price, you could easily buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 for $999 and all of the other parts you require to build a gaming PC.
Everyone will have different reasons for picking one Nvidia graphics card over another, and for me, performance was the leading factor that drove me to buy an RTX 5080, in concert with the 4K monitor I own. I already had an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, but I felt the need for more oomph to run a select few games that came out this year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was the big one, and I wanted to play it with the best possible image quality I could achieve. Alas, an upgrade to an 8K monitor was not in my budget, so that meant running the game at 4K with maxed-out settings (preferably without my PC sounding like a jet about to take off).