Comparison
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 for local LLMs
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB usable, 1790 GB/s) vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB usable, 960 GB/s) for local LLMs: capacity decides which models load at all, memory bandwidth decides the speed tier. Verdicts below are computed per model at each machine's best clean quant.
| Spec | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 |
|---|---|---|
| Type | NVIDIA GPU | NVIDIA GPU |
| Memory for models | 32 GB VRAM | 16 GB VRAM |
| Memory bandwidth | 1790 GB/s | 960 GB/s |
| Price | $1,999 MSRP | $999 MSRP |
| TDP | 575 W | 360 W |
| Backends | CUDA · Vulkan | CUDA · Vulkan |
| Gaming (estimate) | 4K-class | 4K-class |
Specs as of 2026-07-08 — sources on each product page. Gaming tier is estimated from FP32 compute, not a game benchmark.
What each can run, head to head
The 12 most-downloaded models we track, each graded at that machine's best clean-fit quant (llama.cpp, 8K context). Click a verdict for the full breakdown.
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Verdicts computed from published specs and measured GGUF sizes — how the math works.