Great review overall. Excellent analysis on heat, size, power consumption, and cost.
However, and this is not specific to this review, this seems to be a reviewer's trend across all sites that I don't understand: Why the focus on synthetic benchmarks and disabling DLSS and Multi-frame generation? Is it to create drama and click-bait (not this review) by saying Nvidia's new 5000 GPU **FAILS** to provide a big gain over the 4000 series? Or, is that just because the synthetics can't test with those effectively? If so, then I think the synthetic tests are no longer useful at all for real-world gaming, which will generally include the latest DLSS and frame generation.
"In gaming, the RTX 5080 scores on average about 14% lower than the RTX 4090 and about 32% lower than the RTX 5090. That's without any of the new DLSS 4 magic in place, which pushes the RTX 5080 well beyond the RTX 4090's framerate capabilities." The second sentence there is the one that matters, but the quantitative data is in the first sentence making a meaningless comparison and undermining the accomplishment of the 5080.
It's like a car review for a twin turbo flat 4 car compared to last year's model with a V6: "We disabled the Turbo chargers so we could compare the raw power of the engines in our 0-60 and 1/4 mile tests." Why would you do that? No real-world driver is going to disable the turbo. They just care about the actual performance comparison. It's OK to mention there's a bit of a turbo lag compared to the old model, but not to disable the feature.
For the GPU user (at least for me), what I care about is how many FPS will I get with everything turned on to yield the best possible experience -- DLSS, MFG, Reflex, etc. If the 4090 only supports DLSS 3.5 with single frame gen while the 5080 supports DLSS 4, Multi Frame Generation, and adds Reflex to reduce latency when framegen is on, then compare with all those on, because that's the primary real world use case. And when AMD releases their 9000 series cards, I'll want to compare theirs with the latest FSR and all their other features also cranked up.
Why bother with results with the card's key benefits turned off, other than for academic interest in how well Nvidia also optimized the old-school raster performance? That's mostly only relevant for the older games that already hit over 120fps. If you're focused on those games, then you're already getting the best possible experience witht older boards and further graphic upgrades yield negligible additional value anyway. The purpose to upgrading to a modern high-end GPU is to handle games with heavy ray tracing. That means games that take advantage of AI, DLSS, MFG, and Reflex. So, other than for the academic footnotes, why compare with those turned off?
E.g., I see in the Cyberpunk screenshot: 68fps with multi framegen off but 235 with it on. 235 is the number that matters. How does that compare with 4080 or 4090? I believe it beats the 4090, but don't see that comparison. That's the one that matters. (Apologies if it's there and I missed it).
Framegen is fine for UX as long as the base framerate (pre-framegen) is above about 30fps. Below that and there tend to be latency problems or quick graphical effects that are distorted by the generated frames, but as long as the base framerate is somewhere in that 30-60fps range, artificial frames to juice that to the max the human eye can see is fine -- only upside, no reason to disable it.
We're getting close to where mass market cards (will the 5070 be considered mass market? or maybe even the future 5060 will be able to handle it at lower settings) can support full path tracing for games, meaning game devs will finally be able to stop spending hundreds or thousands of hours baking in fake lighting. We're seeing games like Indiana Jones and the upcoming Doom game require this. Just let the GPU do it all -- save the time and get better visual results. Because this frees a significant percentage of development effort, ray tracing is the most important advance in gaming, even for those who don't care about it for the visual impact.
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