Gameplay Performance with Ray Tracing
In this section, we enable ray tracing in those games that support it. We did have to dial down the resolution in the games to attain playable FPS. All Ray Tracing was performed at 1440p (2560×1440). All settings otherwise are unchanged from the prior section.
Alan Wake 2
Adding ray tracing is always a burden, and no different here. None of the video cards we are testing today can play the game at 60FPS without help. The GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER gets close but falls short regardless. There is an 8% better performance compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition. Once upscaling is enabled, the results improve. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX still has trouble. Here, the GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER is 20% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition. If you overclock, you CAN run without upscaling due to an improvement of 5%.
Black Myth: Wukong
This game is rough on video cards from all directions. Only the GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER can handle this game, and only with upscaling. The frame rates are quite low without it, and the game is very choppy. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX just can’t perform here. All in all, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition is 15 and 7% slower than our review card. Once we enable upscaling, the GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER is playable, even more so overclocked, which gains 9%.
Cyberpunk 2077
At 1440p, we see that two of three cards are nicely playable. Enabling upscaling allows all three to surpass 60FPS. The GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER comes out 8% and 11% over the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition and way ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The overclock gives you a nice 8% boost.
Star Wars Outlaws
We still can’t catch a break without upscaling. All the cards struggle badly without upscaling, at 1440 to boot. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX really has trouble here. Surprisingly, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition only lags (no pun intended) by 7%. The GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER does give a smooth gameplay once upscaled, especially overclocked, which gains 4 and 10%.