Nvidia says the RTX 5080 is ‘about’ 15% faster than the RTX 4080 without DLSS

Nvidia made some bold claims about its RTX 50-series GPUs when they were announced earlier this month, saying that the new range can outclass their previous-gen counterparts with twice the performance. Although Nvidia’s new lineup might be among the best graphics cards when they launch, the vast majority of the extra performance comes on the back of the new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation feature that’s exclusive to RTX 50-series GPUs.

During Nvidia’s Editor’s Day for Blackwell GPUs at CES 2025, GeForce desktop product manager Justin Walker said that the RTX 5080 was about 15% faster than the RTX 4080 without DLSS 4, and that the RTX 5070 would be about 20% faster than the RTX 4070 without the feature. Nvidia didn’t provide hard performance numbers for any of the new GPUs it’s releasing, so pay careful attention to the “about” at the start of that statement. Walker provided a general impression of the generational uplift you can expect, but it’s important to wait for reviews before drawing any conclusions about the new cards.

In the charts above, you can see what Walker is talking about. Resident Evil 4 doesn’t support DLSS, and Horizon Forbidden West only supports DLSS 3. The other games Nvidia included support 4X Multi-Frame Generation through DLSS 4.

It makes sense that the generational uplift isn’t quite as impressive as what Nvidia’s CEO claimed on stage when RTX 50-series GPUs were announced. RTX 50-series GPUs include up to 4X Multi-Frame Generation in supported games, while RTX 40-series GPUs only have access to 2X Frame Generation. With twice as many frames being generated, the new range is ostensibly twice as fast across the board — or, at least, in games that support DLSS 4.

Although Nvidia still didn’t provide hard numbers, it did share some ballpark frame rates for the flagship RTX 5090, which we haven’t seen up to this point. In the small sampling of games you can see above, the RTX 5090 is sitting below 50 frames per second (fps) in all four titles at 4K with maximum settings — including path tracing, which all four of these games support. With DLSS 4, Nvidia says you’ll be getting in excess of 250 fps and much lower latency.

On the laptop side of things, Nvidia provided some more concrete numbers. The company says its new range of RTX 50-series mobile GPUs enable 40% better battery life in gaming laptops, and that they’ll be available in laptops as thin as 14.9mm, which may be a call-out to the new Razer Blade 16. A big part of the battery savings comes from a feature Nvidia is calling BatteryBoost. This saves power during gameplay, and it accounts for that 40% improvement in battery life.

Nvidia says BatteryBoost saves power dynamically in games, particularly in scenes with little or no motion, small changes in pixels, or minimal player interaction, such as dialogue sequences. Nvidia claims the new Blackwell architecture has 1,000 times faster frequency response, allowing the GPU to very quickly ramp up and down in frequency, as well as enhanced sleep states. The company says it has reduced the time to enter deep sleep power state by a factor of 10, and those two changes play a big role in the battery savings.

Laptops packing Nvidia’s new GPUs are set to arrive in March, and Nvidia says it will have designs from “every major OEM,” including Lenovo, HP, MSI, Razer, Dell, Acer, Asus, and Gigabyte starting at $1,299 for an RTX 5070 and climbing to $2,899 for an RTX 5090.