Hardware modding channel TrashBench has shared a new video putting the old GTX 1080 Ti from the Pascal era against the brand-new Blackwell RTX 5050. What was supposed to be a showdown of the GTX 1080 Ti’s overclocking and performance capabilities, where it crushes the new RTX, turned out to be the opposite.
The original expectation was that the GTX 1080 Ti still had enough chutzpah to beat the RTX 5050, but the new Blackwell chip refused to lose against the ageing card. Out of the box, RTX 5050 showed good performance, comfortably surpassing the last GTX flagship in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077. The GTX 1080 Ti managed to claim a win in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, edging the new budget GPU by 3%, but not enough to be meaningful. Even after equipping it with a custom liquid cooling setup, the GTX 1080 Ti wasn’t able to push further, barely boosting its stock performance by 3%.
Due to these unexpected results, TrashBench decided to turn attention towards the RTX 5050, also overclocking it to see how much untapped performance is dormant inside. To give it a fighting chance, TrashBench swapped the original dual-fan heatsink for a CPU tower cooler from Cooler Master.
Properly cooled, the RTX 5050 was able to reach up to 3.3GHz, meaning a 28% increase over its stock configuration. This allowed it to gain 17% more fps in the aforementioned games, leaving the GTX 1080 Ti in the dust, all while claiming a bunch of 3DMark Time Spy records on the way. That said, as often shown lately, the GTX 1080 Ti’s 11GB of VRAM trumps the RTX 5050’s 8GB in memory-hungry games, so the fight isn’t settled yet.
This shows how it took the GeForce lineup eight years and four GPU generations for an entry model to muster enough horsepower to beat the last GTX flagship. Not bad, considering that the RTX 5050 does so while consuming half the power and costing far less.
