Introduction

The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Vulcan OC joins a long heritage of graphics cards from the company that have shocked and awed us with their features, factory overclock, cooling capability, and lots more. Over the past 15 years, Colorful had a well-earned reputation of building graphics cards with over-the-top designs and features, something the company has worn like a badge of honor. This legacy continues down to the GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell generation with the new iGame RTX 5080 Vulcan OC. Opening its huge product packaging leads us to an enormous 3.5-slot graphics card with some of the largest fans we’ve seen for air cooled graphics cards. The card’s cooler shroud is made of a rich textured metal alloy, with sharp geometric shapes and subtle bits of RGB lighting. The topside has a configurable element—you can either have a large RGB diffuser for the iGame Vulcan logo, or replace it with an included rectangular LCD screen that can be programmed by Colorful’s app to display just about anything, including real time monitoring. The card offers a performance BIOS with factory overclocked speeds of 2685 MHz (vs. 2617 MHz reference).

The GeForce Blackwell graphics architecture introduces Neural Rendering, or the ability for a generative AI model to directly participate in the graphics rendering stack, letting the GPU blend AI-generated objects, materials, and textures, with conventionally rendered raster 3D, just like it combines ray traced objects. AI hence plays a bigger role than simply reconstructing details in DLSS. Speaking of which, the new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation are equally big introductions with this generation. DLSS 4 replaces the convoluted neural networks (CNNs) based AI model with a new Transformers-based one, which is more accurate, and uplifts image quality in all performance tiers of super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame-generation. Multi Frame Generation is a new technology made possible by the Flip Metering capability of Blackwell’s display engine. It basically gives the GPU the ability to guess not one, but up to three frames succeeding a conventionally rendered one, effectively quadrupling frame rates. A single rendered pixel can spawn up to 15 succeeding pixels. DLSS 4 and MFG, along with the new DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 I/O unlock new gaming experiences, such as 8K 60 Hz.

The new Blackwell SM (streaming multiprocessor) comes with concurrent FP32 and INT32 capability for all 128 of its CUDA cores, unlike on Ada, where only half the cores were INT32 capable. It also comes with a redesigned shader execution reordering (SER) that’s aware of neural shader objects. The new 5th Generation Tensor core comes with FP4 data format support, stepping up throughput in lieu of precision. The 4th Generation RT core has new hardware capabilities, enabling Mega Geometry—the ability for ray traced objects to have exponentially higher polygon count using a technique not all that different from Mega Textures—all those polygons come with the cost of intersecting each of them with rays.

The GeForce RTX 5080 debuts the new GB203 silicon, which is NVIDIA’s second largest based on this architecture. Interestingly, it maxes out this silicon, enabling all 84 SM present on it. This works out to 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, 84 RT cores, 336 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. It also maxes out all 64 MB of the chip’s on-die L2 cache. The card gets 16 GB of GDDR7 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, which NVIDIA is running at 30 Gbps, yielding 960 GB/s of bandwidth. All this bandwidth comes in handy with those AI workloads.

The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Vulcan OC is massive, with 37 cm length and 16.4 cm height, with just over 3 slots width. The company’s RTX 5090 product has similar dimensions, so this is a card designed to make your rig stand out in a LAN or an online stream. The company is pricing the card at $1300, a fairly high premium over the $999 NVIDIA baseline.