Nvidia RTX 5080 benchmark suggests this will be a mighty laptop GPU, getting PC gamers excited about the RTX 5090 mobile
RTX 5080 mobile could equal the RTX 4080 Super desktop GPU?
- An RTX 5080 mobile benchmark has been shared from Geekbench
- This was apparently conducted on an Alienware laptop at CES 2025
- The result shows a nippy GPU, though it’s been greeted with somewhat mixed reactions
A benchmark has surfaced for the RTX 5080 laptop GPU, the first (unofficial) result we’ve seen for Nvidia’s next-gen mobile parts that were revealed at CES 2025 – although you shouldn’t get too excited about the score achieved (which is certainly the temptation here, as we’ll see).
Why not? Well, firstly it’s just a purported result – that could be some kind of fake – and secondly, the benchmark is from Geekbench, which is hardly the most useful metric for judging the gaming prowess of the RTX 5080.
The test was seemingly run by a rogue actor (hey, let’s throw in a bit of drama, why not?) on the CES 2025 show floor, who had access to an Alienware 18 Area 51 gaming laptop, and managed to get Geekbench going on the device (as noticed by VideoCardz).
The resulting Geekbench score of 190,326 in the OpenCL (graphics) test for the RTX 5080 has been greeted with somewhat mixed reactions.
Analysis: RTX 5080 looks promising for gaming laptops
That 190,000 score is around 18% faster than the RTX 4080 laptop GPU, so on the one hand, there’s been some chatter that this feels a bit on the lean side for a generational gain. Especially as some folks have chimed in online to say that their RTX 4080 notebook gets closer to 190,000 than the official Geekbench ranking data suggests.
However, if we stick to those official figures, the RTX 5080 is actually 6% faster than the RTX 4090 laptop GPU (and remember, that last-gen flagship has 25% more CUDA cores than the 5080). The RTX 5080 is also about equal to the RTX 4070 Super on the desktop – which is a lot of power packed into a mobile GPU.
Furthermore, this is (presumably) with pre-release drivers (so performance may be a little lacking due to that), and the clock speed is shown at 1.5GHz in this test, which is low – we’d expect it to be running at nearer 2GHz (with boost). The RTX 4080 mobile could boost to 2GHz, or even higher (up towards 2.2GHz).
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Of course, all this bodes well for the performance levels of the new Blackwell laptop flagship, the RTX 5090.
Before we get too carried away with the positivity, though, we need to exercise plenty of skepticism around the purported result – we don’t know much about how this Alienware gaming laptop was configured. And again, remember that Geekbench is far from the best way to put a gaming laptop through its paces (and synthetic tests in general aren’t nearly as useful as real in-game benchmarks).
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).