Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock review: a vertical dream

Anyone that’s ever seen me wander around in my Twisted Tailor suits knows I like a touch of flamboyance in my life. It’s no wonder, then, that Palit’s latest GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock speaks to me in ways no other graphics card quite has, decked out in iridescent bling that’s as slick as the oil it mimicks.

Avoid getting caught in its hypnotic gaze just long enough and it affords you the opportunity to also appreciate the chip beneath. Nvidia’s high-end GeForce RTX 5080 divides some with smaller generational uplifts in the rasterised arena than expected, but there’s no doubt Blackwell’s neural rendering capabilities usher in a new age of AI-driven frames with enough oomph to double your performance.

The question now remains just how difficult it’ll be to get your hands on one. Stock shortages mean shelves will be empty for the foreseeable, but if history repeats itself, it’ll be partner cards much like Palit’s GameRock range to the rescue.

Specifications

Standing out from the army of aftermarket alternatives, Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock packs a neat overclock that pushes frequencies to 2,872MHz. Glancing over our sensor logs for Founders Edition, which averages 2,790MHz, this gives it an extra 82MHz to play with. It might not sound like much on paper, but it has an impact when it comes to crunch time.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes, however, let’s take a look at our patent-pending Club386 Table of Doom™ to see where it sits compared to the ghosts of GPU past.

GeForce RTX	5080	4080 Super	3080
Launch date	Jan 2025	Jan 2024	Sep 2020
Codename	GB203	AD103	GA102
Architecture	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Ampere
Process	TSMC 4N (5nm)	TSMC 4N (5nm)	Samsung 8N
Transistors (bn)	45.6	45.9	28.3
Die size (mm2)	378	378.6	628.4
SMs	84 of 84	80 of 80	68 of 84
CUDA cores	10,752	10,240	8,704
Boost clock (MHz)	2,617	2,550	1,710
Peak FP32 TFLOPS	56.3	52.2	29.77
RT cores	84 (4th Gen)	80 (3rd Gen)	68 (2nd Gen)
RT TFLOPS	170.6	121	58
Tensor cores	336 (5th Gen)	320 (4th Gen)	272 (3rd Gen)
FP16 Acc TFLOPS	450.2	418	238.2
Peak FP4 TFLOPS	1,801	836	–
ROPs	112	112	96
Texture units	336	320	272
Memory size (GB)	16	16	10
Memory type	GDDR7	GDDR6X	GDDR6X
Memory bus (bits)	256	256	320
Memory clock (Gb/s)	30	23	19
Bandwidth (GB/s)	960	737	760
L2 cache (KB)	65,536	65,536	5,120
PCIe interface	Gen 5	Gen 4	Gen 4
Video engines	2 x NVENC (9th Gen) 2 x NVDEC (6th Gen)	2 x NVENC (8th Gen) 1 x NVDEC (5th Gen)	1 x NVENC (7th Gen) 1 x NVDEC (5th Gen)
Power (watts)	360W	320W	320W
MSRP	$999	$999	$699

At a glance, raw specs don’t stray too far from GeForce RTX 4080 Super. Its 378mm² die is near enough the same size, carrying 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, and 84 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) – each just a 5% jump over its predecessor. You’ll even spot the return of 16GB of memory, which certainly raises an eyebrow given ever-increasing system requirements.

Fortunately, its real merit isn’t quantity; it’s how Blackwell puts each of these elements to use. Fifth generation Tensor cores work alongside upgraded SMs capable of flipping between floating point or integer workloads in their entirety, while memory moves to blistering GDDR7. In fact, if numbers are what you’re after, RTX 5080 here currently has the fastest graphics memory on the planet with clocks reaching a lofty 30Gb/s.

There’s a lot more to the architecture that warrants a scan of Parm’s GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition review, but all these nips and tucks are in service of Nvidia’s AI efforts, enabling Multi Frame Generation. MFG, as I’ll call it, affords RTX 50 Series cards the ability to slot up to three AI-generated frames into a game for every one natively rendered. While DLSS 4 holds many goodies for previous generation cards, it’s this one-click performance boost that makes RTX 5080 such a weapon.

Design

We sometimes get nostalgic for the character-led box art of old, but Palit demonstrates a healthy balance of showing exactly what you get on the tin while making it similarly eye-catching.

Crack open the casing and you’ll see your sparkling new graphics card within. Palit packs RTX 5080 GameRock with a few goodies, including an ARGB cable to sync all lighting up with your motherboard, a 16-pin splitter leading to a trio of eight pins, and a VGA holder plus extender to support the bulk of this 3.5-slot behemoth. At 331.9 x 150 x 70.4mm, it’s a decent size bigger than Nvidia’s standard Founders Edition, but its lightweight plastic construction makes it that much easier to install.

Palit has the right idea when crafting a card that exists in the same space as Founders Edition. Rather than competing with the beloved professional look of Nvidia’s in-house designs, it’s decided to win hearts with a much bolder approach.

Encasing the trio of nine-bladed fans is a reflective faceplate adorned with colourful grooves that shimmer and shine based on the world around it. It’s frankly captivating, building off the crystalised look of RTX 4090 GameRock for a debatably more mature approach.

The moment you switch it on, the entire graphics card comes to life with brightly lit colours that dance along the beautiful pattern. As you can tell, it looks a treat in its standard configuration but it’s a shame to see its crown jewel pointing towards the bottom. In my opinion, Palit RTX 5080 GameRock is destined for vertical mounting if you can contend with its chonky form factor.

Speaking of growth, Palit has traded its Guitar Hero-style GameRock logo for typography more befitting of 2025. It’s a small shift, but one that makes the graphics card more timeless. I’m a little torn on the white GeForce RTX logo, which used to glow to the theme of your PC with RGB lighting on previous models, but intricate details along the bezel go a long way to distracting the eyes.

Facing facts, your peepers will mostly be staring at the screen in front of you rather than through the tempered glass window of your chassis anyway. Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock sports a single HDMI 2.1b and three DisplayPort 2.1b slots that utilise display stream compression (DSC) for up to 4K 12-bit HDR at 480Hz or 8K 12-bit HDR at 165Hz. Ample resolutions indeed.

Like all RTX 50 Series cards, Palit draws its power from a 12V-2×6 port, which itself is an upgrade over the controversial 12VHPWR. Unlike the previous standard, you won’t need to worry about it sitting right, as a much-needed overhaul has reinforced the contact block. There’s also no need to upgrade your old PSU so long as it provides enough juice, although there is merit to a native 12VHPWR power supply in that a single cable avoids the tanglings of a splitter.

Nvidia advises you to go with an 850W power supply to best feed all your components. However, the reality is that RTX 5080 is far more conservative in its draw. Alongside an enthusiast processor and 64GB of hungry DDR5 RAM in our Club386 test bench, the card idles at 104W and needs 471W under load. Palit’s model is actually 4W tamer than Founders Edition, which I already deemed frugal compared to its estimated 360W rating.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, this test used Palit’s default Performance Mode. It’s dual BIOS offers a second Silent Mode that places extra limitations to eliminate noise at the flick of a switch, but it might not be worth the trade-off. As it stands, Performance Mode runs at a barely audible 40.1dB in our ultra-quiet rig, translating to 63°C. This is both less than 0.4dB higher and 1°C cooler than Founders Edition, all with an extra fan in the mix.

Performance

Although I’ve pointed out the sheer size of Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock, it slips into our Club386 test platform like a dream, no alterations needed. This means we can pit it against eight other graphics cards to determine the true might of Blackwell’s high-end compared to the previous generation.

Apps and AI

Palit’s overclocked speeds further bridge the gap to RTX 4090 in 3DMark, sitting within just 10% of the former flagship. This also extends its lead over RTX 4080 Super by up to 23% in the ray tracing confines of Speed Way and 28% in high-end rasterised Steel Nomad tests.

There are still questions of comparative value against the superstar RTX 5090, but it cements its place as the best x80 Series GPU money can buy with up to a 40% lead over the nearest competitor.

Gaming isn’t Palit’s only battleground, as RTX 5080 GameRock serves up 9,213 samples per minute in Blender. That’s double the closest Radeon, 9% swifter than RTX 4080 Super, around 18% short of RTX 4090.

Pushing Nvidia’s artificial intelligence-driven hardware to its limit, Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock earns its place as the second-strongest AI card on the market. Clocking a half precision score of 57,354 in Geekbench AI, it’s second only to RTX 5090 with a 15% gap between the two.

In fact, it’s closer to the Blackwell flagship than any other card, running away 18% ahead of RTX 4080 Super and a whopping 33% in front of Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I’m interested to see where the long-awaited Radeon RX 9070 XT will fit into the mix.

Translating these etheral numbers into something tangible, Procyon’s AI Text Generation benchmark subjects our graphics cards to several large language models (LLMs). RTX 5090 still eclipses all alternatives, but our high-end card is nothing to scoff at.

In fact, Palit’s tinkering sees RTX 5080 GameRock usurp RTX 4090 with a score of 4,750. It’s less than a 1% lead, but a win is a win in the land of benchmarks. Otherwise, you can expect a tremendous 23% leap over RTX 4080 Super, 35% over Ampere, and double that of Radeon’s best efforts.

Gaming

All good indications, but it’s important to temper synthetic tests with a dose of reality. Here’s how Palit’s newcomer fares in Club386’s range of triple-A games across 1920×1080 (FHD), 2560×1440 (QHD) and 3840×2160 (UHD) resolutions.

Much like Procyon, Palit gains ground with its higher frequencies, putting it on par with RTX 4090 in Assassin’s Creed Mirage at FHD. We give RTX 5080 GameRock the win here due to its higher minimums, as they make for a more pleasant experience when stutters inevitably come knocking.

Admittedly, this is more of a high-resolution graphics card, and the competition heats when more pixels are involved. Still, it sits where it belongs, right in between RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4090, and 23% short of its bigger brother.

The story steers the course in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, where Palit’s model runs consistently better than Founders Edition. Generally, you can expect around 5fps more than Team Green’s in-house solution and around 33% less than the top dog. Not bad when factoring in the substantially lower MSRP.

Palit navigates Forza Motorsport’s demanding settings well, getting RTX 5080 over that 60fps threshold at UHD – something that Founders Edition fails at. That extra leg up situates it within 6% of its more expensive 90-class predecessor, marking great value for money.

Palit sees the same wobbles as all RTX 5080 cards in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, slipping behind even a Radeon RX 7900 XT at lower resolutions. Fortunately, it claws back the distance as we crank up the detail, snug back in third place with 177fps at UHD. Just make sure to pair it with a deserving display.

Most graphics cards run Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction with relative ease, as just one sees the lowly depths of double digit frame rates. That said, GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock has a particularly stellar showing at the lowest and highest resolutions, running the shooter up to 10% better than Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 16% smoother than RTX 4080 Super.

DLSS

Through rasterised performance alone, RTX 5080 might not offer enough to entice an upgrade from former high-end cards, but that’s not all it has up its sleeve. Enter DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation magic, which asserts more frames than brute forcing could ever conceive.

Taking to Night City with Cyberpunk 2077’s eye-watering Overdrive preset, our nine graphics cards face the most intense ray tracing possible in 2025. Most Radeon cards fare well enough to meet the 60fps bar thanks to the helping hand of FSR3 and Frame Generation, right up until UHD resolution. Even then, triple figure frame rates are almost entirely off limits.

Swapping to DLSS, RTX 4080 Super sees a small boost to reach the minimum we’d consider playable at 4K, but it’s only through the wizardry of 4x Multi Frame Generation that RTX 5080 GameRock hits more than double at a coveted 135fps. It’s tough to imagine why you’d ever want to scale this back to 3x and settle on 111fps when more is always available, but there are one or two caveats to consider.

While DLSS 4 showcases far fewer artefacts than previous models, it’s still not impervious to the occasional shimmer that might draw you out of the experience. AI-generated frames also aren’t entirely as fluid as natively created ones, but I’d make the case that 100fps through upscaling is always going to be smoother than sub-60fps without. It’s very much based on personal preference, so be aware that your mileage may vary.

Conclusion

Palit has taken an already impressive foundation and turned it into a spectacle worthy of your attention. From its dazzling design to great performance, GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock pushes past the barriers Nvidia sets for higher frame rates that sometimes even dethrone RTX 4090 from its lofty heights – as you’d expect for a slightly higher £1,099 asking price.

It’s not an instant upgrade by any stretch, as leaner generational gains in rasterised performance make it less meaningful for anyone already sporting a high-end 40 Series card. Maintaining 16GB of memory also stands out as an odd choice given that games slowly but surely become more demanding every other year. That said, it’s important to recognise we’re in the days of diminished returns when it comes to raw performance.

Instead, GeForce RTX 5080 GameRock pursues alternative improvements in the form of industry-leading AI, which makes for performance enhancements of the likes we’ve never seen. You can consider it a bite of the future starting with 75 games, only set to grow from here on out.