The best argument for grabbing a 5080 right now, if you can find one at $999 in the first place, is that the only cards that come close to its performance are either way more expensive than they're supposed to be (the 4080 Super) or not cheap enough to justify the Nvidia-specific features you give up (AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX).

After reviews for the RTX 5090 debuted and muted Nvidia’s claims of “double 4090” performance with a real-world 30% upgrade, everyone hoped the 5080 might make for a more exciting improvement. At the very least,

It’s disappointing to see Nvidia has stuck with 16GB of VRAM on the RTX 5080. AMD’s RX 7900 XTX offers 24GB, and while the RTX 5080 delivers better performance for now, it may well hit video memory limits in 4K gaming in the future.