I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. We are living in the future we all dreamed about as kids. The phone in your pocket has (almost) all the computing power you could wish for to stay in contact with anyone anywhere on earth. I mean, did you know that the latest iPhone and Samsung models have satellite messaging capabilities?
These days, we are seeing an incredible wave of new and updated technologies hit the consumer market. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in my 20 years of reporting on technology. Case in point: January is barely over, and we’ve already seen two major technology launches in South Africa.
The latest is Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 50 series graphics cards. While rarer than a floppy drive on a gaming rig in 2025, we have it on good authority that South Africa should receive more stock in the coming weeks from the various vendors. The first RTX 50 series graphics card we’ve gotten our hands on is the gorgeous GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC Launch Edition from MSI. The SOC stands for Super OverClocked, and its boosted clock rate is 2,74GHz in Extreme Performance mode. The standard Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is specced at 2.62Ghz; for comparison, the GeForce RTX 4080 was rated at 2.51Ghz.
If these numbers don’t mean anything to you, know that the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC Launch Edition runs much faster than the base edition but is not that much faster in raw performance than its predecessor. With the introduction of Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture, the company has made it known that AI will play a larger role in image rendering than merely clock cycles on the GPU. This means that software enhancements through AI algorithms will play a big role in game performance, and it makes a lot of sense when you look at the technology.
I wrote a comprehensive article on how the new Nvidia GPUs work with DLSS 4, so check it out here if you are curious. The long and short of it is that the latest graphics cards from Nvidia can insert up to four frames between each real frame that your GPU renders, thus improving the frame rate up to four times through Multi-Frame Generation. Of course, your mileage will vary based on your PC and graphics card specs.
That is not to say that the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC Launch Edition isn’t the fastest graphics we’ve reviewed yet because, my goodness, this thing is impressive. Running on our test rig, which sports an Intel Core i7 14700k processor, 32GB or DDR5 RAM and features the always impressive MSI Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi motherboard, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC Launch Edition delivered impressive graphics performance on every game we played which included all the big hitters like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War Ragnarok, Diablo IV, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
While only about 75 games support DLSS 4 at launch, the new Nvidia App also features an override setting that allows you to enable the extra DLSS frame on selected games. This makes even more use of Nvidia’s AI technology to inject an extra frame between your game’s real frames.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 supports gaming up to 4K with a maximum supported resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels and unless you have a high-end gaming machine, you’ll likely encounter a few bottlenecks on your current rig when using this graphics card. For one thing, this card draws about 360w at peak performance, which is about 50w more than the GeForce RTX 4080. As a result, you may need to upgrade your power supply if you have anything less than 800w, but I’d aim for more headroom if you can.
Another feature is this card’s support for PCIE Gen 5, which doubles the data transfer rates and bandwidth over PCIE Gen 4—really impressive stuff. This technology is still a bit new and not all motherboards support it. It’s certainly not critical for operation, but the extra data throughput rates will be important for certain large-scale applications. Even though our benchmark rig does not sport PCIE 5, it’s still the fastest gaming graphics card we’ve reviewed.
What’s in the box?
To celebrate the launch of the Nvidia GeForce 50 series, MSI put together a really cool launch edition. Based on the Blind Box concept, each Vanguard Launch edition comes with one of 10 Lucky collectors’ edition figurines. Our review unit came with Astronaut Lucky, certainly my favourite from the collection. There’s also a welcome card with more information on the collector’s edition and an MSI-branded graphics card support stand with a magnetised base. The graphics card you’ll find in this launch edition is the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC edition, which, as mentioned, is the fastest overclocked version of this card in the MSI range.
Game and Benchmark Performance
Nvidia’s technology leap with the Geforce RTX 50 series is not just about raw performance. In fact, if you currently run an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090, you won’t see as much of a performance jump as you would if you upgrade from an RTX 30 series. That is exactly the upgrade path I experienced. I am currently gaming on a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and the jump in performance is simply staggering.
In almost every game I played, I ran at maxed-out settings and achieved really high frame rates in each case. Most notable is Cyberpunk 2077 on its Ray Tracing Overdrive setting, which yielded an average frame rate of 86fps with DLSS disabled. With DLSS 4 enabled, I got an average of 153fps – a pretty massive jump in performance at the top end of this game’s graphic settings.
At launch, Nvidia announced 75 game titles that supported DLSS 4, including the new Indian Jones and the Great Circle, Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel Rivals, Diablo IV, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and Silent Hill 2. With DLSS 4 enabled, you’ll notice a significant jump in performance for each of these titles. With games that don’t support it yet, you can manually switch on DLSS 4 override on some games using the Nvidia app, but your performance will vary, and not all games work with the manual override mode.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 peaked at 200fps, and I absolutely loved playing Indian Jones and the Golden Circle on Supreme graphics quality for an average frame rate of 136fps. This game looks absolutely stunning in full graphic settings.
Looking at other benchmarks, Blackmyth Wukong, on its Cinematic setting, delivered an average of 153fps, while 3dMark Speedway topped our charts at 8775 without any further overclocking on the card.
Regarding video editing, it was no surprise that the RTX 5080 could render frames at lightning-fast speed, too. Rendering some of our 4K videos compared to my current RTX 3080 production machine showed about a 20% to 30% performance improvement.
The GeForce RTX 5080 is an impressive card that performs incredibly well, but its limited performance improvements over the RX 4080 series will make it an unappealing upgrade for some. At well over R30,000, this is not something the average gamer in South Africa will invest in just yet, but there will likely be a positive uptick in the second-hand market for RTX 30 and 40 series cards in the coming months. I am also very interested to see what the entry-level GeForce RTX 50 graphics series cards will look like in terms of performance.