RTX 5070 Ti vs RTX 5080: Which One Should You Buy in 2026?

How much faster is the 5080?

Two Tom’s Hardware tables answer this, and they measure different things.

The first is average frame rate. Jeffrey Kampman’s Tom’s Hardware GPU hierarchy, updated June 24, 2026, averages 11 raster games and 8 ray-traced games on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with no upscaling, and two of my pages carry its rows for this pair, the 4K 240Hz GPU page with both 4K rows and the 1440p ray-tracing row, and the RTX 5070 vs 5070 Ti comparison with the 1440p raster pair. The percentages are mine.

The second is Tom’s relative score, each card as a share of the RTX 5090, which my 2026 GPU hierarchy ranks 43 cards on and re-checked against Tom’s on September 22, 2026.

The two tables agree within a tenth of a point. The gap grows with resolution. Nowhere does it reach 15%.

GamersNexus tested both cards on its own bench. Steve Burke’s RTX 5070 Ti review of February 21, 2025 found the 5080 “generally 9% to 16% better” depending on the resolution and game, and 13% ahead in Resident Evil 4 at 1440p. Same shape.

What each frame costs

Divide the price by the frame rate. On October 1, 2026 at about 12:30 CDT I read Newegg’s buy boxes for the cheapest new card of each GPU sold and shipped by Newegg, and found the RTX 5070 Ti at $1,179.99 for the MSI Ventus 3X OC, with GIGABYTE’s Eagle OC at the same $1,179.99 , and the RTX 5080 at $1,679.99 for the MSI Ventus 3X OC in white, with the black version at the same $1,679.99 . The gap is $500.00. That is 42.4% on top of the Ti.

A 42.4% premium against a lead that tops out at 14.7% means every 5080 frame costs more. At 1440p raster a Ti frame costs $10.10 and a 5080 frame $13.09. At 4K with ray tracing, the 5080’s best row, it is $32.15 against $39.90. Prices move weekly, so if either listing has changed, divide the new price by the frame rate in the first table.

Same chip, same memory, 20% more cores

I read NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 family page and its RTX 5080 page on October 1, 2026. Neither lists memory speed, so that row comes from ASUS’s Prime RTX 5070 Ti and ROG Astral RTX 5080 spec pages.

Both cards use NVIDIA’s GB203 chip, as my 5070 vs 5070 Ti page and my Astral dataset record, with 8,960 of its cores enabled on the 5070 Ti and 10,752 on the 5080. What the 5080 adds is compute, 20% more cores at a slightly higher boost clock, plus 7.1% more memory bandwidth from faster GDDR7 on the same 256-bit bus. Capacity does not change. A game or model that fits in 16 GB on one card fits on the other.

The power limit is not the power draw

NVIDIA rates the 5080 at 360 W and the 5070 Ti at 300 W, and asks for 850 W and 750 W supplies. Partner boards go further. My ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC ships at a 400 W power limit, and ASUS’s March 2025 BIOS raised its ceiling to 450 W, as my Astral review records. The captures below ran at a 448 W limit. So this partner card’s limit sits 40 to 90 W above NVIDIA’s reference figure and 100 to 150 W above the 5070 Ti’s.

What the card drew is a different number. On June 28, 2026 I logged board power every five seconds across a 25-minute gaming session on my hand-tuned profile, 308 samples, and published the raw log with the dataset. The maximum was 325.73 W. The average was 260.99 W. Forty-six samples sat at 300 W or above, none reached 360 W, the throttle register read zero on every row, and the core averaged 56 °C. In my LLM power-efficiency dataset, captured August 19, 2026 at the 448 W limit, loaded medians across four models ran from 265 to 344 W and never touched the cap either.

So the firmware headroom on this partner 5080 went unused in both workloads, and its gaming peak stayed 34 W under NVIDIA’s reference figure. The step from a 750 W supply with two 8-pin cables to an 850 W supply with three is written on the spec sheet. In the gaming log and the LLM runs, the draw never got there. Buy the 850 W unit anyway. ASUS recommends 850 W for the Astral, a figure it bases on a fully overclocked GPU and CPU, and my RTX 50-series PSU guide itemizes the build.

Here is the scope. One card, one gaming session with the game not named, one profile, board power only, no wall measurement. I own no 5070 Ti, so the 264 W row is GamersNexus’s figure from their bench, there for reference and never as a like-for-like pair with my log. No benchmark run against a 5070 Ti is planned.

For local LLMs, the gap splits in two

I own no 5070 Ti, so for the pair I use the community numbers in the llama.cpp CUDA performance discussion, where owners run llama-bench on Llama 2 7B Q4_0 and post results from whatever commit and host they have. It is a survey. There is no controlled test behind it.

Generation streams the model’s weights through memory once per token, so it tracks bandwidth, and the bandwidth gap is 7.1%. Prompt processing is compute. There the 5080’s 20% more cores show. For interactive chat the two cards will feel the same. For long-context ingestion or batch prefill the 5080 buys 13% to 19%.

My own 5080 numbers come from a different stack. In my RTX 5080 LLM throughput dataset, captured August 12, 2026 with ollama 0.32.1 on driver 610.88 and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the Astral decoded gpt-oss:20b at 187.3 to 190.1 tokens a second and Qwen 2.5 7B Q4_K_M at 176.6 to 180.0. Different models, a different runtime and no 5070 Ti column, so they do not pair with the llama-bench rows.

Where the 5080 earns its price

Two cases. Both need a name before you pay.

The first is 4K with ray tracing. Tom’s 4K ray-tracing averages, 42.1 fps against 36.7, are the widest gap in the table, and the 1440p pair, 74.0 against 66.2, stands in for the input rate of 4K at DLSS Quality. My 4K 240Hz GPU page explains why that input rate decides whether frame generation feels right, and it puts the 5070 Ti on the line and the 5080 clear of it. If that is your monitor, the 5080 is the card.

The second is paid compute. Work that scales with CUDA cores gets the 20% from the spec sheet and the 13% to 19% from the llama-bench prefill rows. If the card bills hours, $500 is cheap. If it only raises a benchmark score, the money buys nothing you will see at 1440p.

For everyone else the first table says the Ti.

So which should you buy?

I may earn a commission if you buy through these affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• For 1440p, and for 4K without ray tracing, the RTX 5070 Ti. Its frames cost less in every row of the first table. Newegg had the MSI RTX 5070 Ti 16G Ventus 3X OC at $1,179.99 on October 1, 2026. Buy it at Newegg, or check the current price on Amazon’s RTX 5070 Ti search. For a tower, the RTX 5070 Ti prebuilt guide ranks the 9800X3D machines Newegg sold on September 30, 2026.
• For 4K with ray tracing, or for paid work that scales with CUDA cores, the RTX 5080. Budget the 850 W supply and the third cable with it. Newegg had the MSI RTX 5080 16G Ventus 3X OC Black at $1,679.99 on October 1, 2026, and the white version at the same price. Buy it at Newegg, or check the current price on Amazon’s RTX 5080 search. For a tower, the RTX 5080 prebuilt guide ranks the 9800X3D machines Newegg sold on September 1, 2026.
• If ray tracing is off the table, price the RX 9070 XT before either. Above the 5080, see RTX 5090 vs 5080.

Both cards sit in the S tier of my 2026 GPU hierarchy, four places apart. The $500 between them buys the ray-traced 4K row and the prefill rows. Make sure one of those is yours.