Classic: used current best vs upcoming 5080?

[XoR_]

I have chance to get used 4090 for about 96 bucks more than absolutely best price 5080 could have where I live (taxes and all). It has 1 year warranty left. Supposedly lighty used at reduced power for silent operation. In fat I know for a fact PC with the card wad not used for quite a few months.

Specs of 5080 look much weaker for rasterisation and to my eyes RT should still run better on 4090 vs 5080 even with improvements. 'AI' IS improved on 5080 but again 4090 had lots of cores and therefore doesn't seem to be much slower, in theory.

I guess this is typical issue right now...
Solution like 5090 I could execute but especially with 4090 availability and prices at launch were so terrible I would not have confidence anything other than 5080 is 'buyable' I a three weeks for MSRP (+ tax)

VRAM is on 90 side and I already have 16GB on 6900XT and would want to avoid issues I had on 2070 where usable detailshad to be dropped to avoid stuttering.

For reference I game on OLEDs having 1440p 360Hz or 2160p 138Hz.
I tested the card yesterday and everything worked much better than 6900xt except Fortnite which seems CPU limited at 1440p with TSR even on my 6900xt with most notable improvement being reflex makes it unnecesary to limit frame rate and at higher resolution game starts hitting GPU hard. RT works on 6900xt but is a bit to slow. 4090 handles it much better.

So... is 4090 still preferable here over upcoming 5090?
MFG would be nice but with how laggy FG already is I would probably not use it much. DLSS2 will get improvement on all RTX cards so this is not Blackwell exclusive...
What about new Reflex with frame prediction? Hard to day how useful it will be and I didn't see it mentioned it will need new GPUs... did I miss the info? Looks like something for FG/MFG anyways which will be slower than just having better framerate anyways.

Opinions?

 

[Elios]

take the 4090. given the same offer i would. the 4090 is likely to be still 5% faster then 5080 and has more vram. the only thing lose out on multi frame DLSS frame gen which i can take or leave really

 

[XoR_]

4090 installed in a PC. It did not fit in my 'normal' case but nothing pair of pliers could not fix. Had to remove 3.5" drive bay. I totally forgot 4090 is ridiculously huge - especially non-Nvidia models.

So far from things I tried (mostly RT stuff) card blows 6900XT out of the water with much better image quality with same upscaling factors courtesy of DLSS2 vs FSR2/XeSS. Heck, DLSS is not really needed for 1440p but helps 4K run the same.

Anyways, I watched few videos, pixel and otherwise analysis of Blackwell and 4090 seems like more all-round and reasonable choice for all variety of games vs 5080 and other than immediate availability of 4090 this was the main reason to drop idea of getting 5080.
Probably I would be quite happy with 5080 also... until hitting VRAM limits that is.

 

[Elios]

good to hear. and yeah it should do 1440p with out any need for upscaling what can do if the game offers it is use DLAA mode and get free AA in place of the upscaling. at 1440p you would been unlikely to hit vram wall on the 5080 its more of an issue at 4k.

 

[XoR_]

good to hear. and yeah it should do 1440p with out any need for upscaling what can do if the game offers it is use DLAA mode and get free AA in place of the upscaling. at 1440p you would been unlikely to hit vram wall on the 5080 its more of an issue at 4k.

Looking at average frame rates in GPU reviews it would seem 4090 is not enough for some games at 1440p without some DLSS.
It is not an issue though and the more I think about it the less it seems something like 5080 can possibly be a better card for these harder cases.

BTW. I just rechecked all the info about new GPUs and I did in fact miss information about Reflex 2 that it will come to all RTX cards and will be only limited time exclusive for Blackwell. Unlike MFG and FG that RTX 4090 already supports the Reflex 2 sounds like it can be amazing tech. With fast monitor like 360Hz it should help <180fps games to both look smoother and feel more responsive allowing to push higher details.

If I was Valorant gamer I would perhaps have some doubts if I made right choice... but then again apparently Valorant at even 4K with maxed out settings on 4090 easily runs above 200fps on even Zen3 CPU so it kinda does not matter even if I did try this game and liked it.
I will start to worry if Reflex 2 comes to Fortnite before it comes to RTX 4090

Fortnite in DX12 at max details even with Performance DLSS doesn't run that hot. On one hand GPU is apparently 99% utilized but its power is laughably low and performance isn't that much better than 6900XT (which also ran well below its maximum allowed power) while CPU used a lot so it is obviossly a CPU bottleneck - good reprojection based frame generation might be useful in this case even if sweats will jitter so much there is no chance Nvidia's ML algorithms to predict their actual movement.