I currently have an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 non-OC in excellent condition, along with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and a 27-inch 4K 240Hz monitor. I mainly play Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Elden Ring, RuneScape, and EA FC at high settings, and I would like to take advantage of the monitor's refresh rate.
Used RTX 5090 cards are selling for roughly £3,600–£3,800 in the UK, while an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC costs around £1,600. Selling my 5090 and buying the 5080 would leave me with approximately £2,000.
The trade-off is that the 5090 is around 45–55% faster at 4K in many reviews and has 32GB of VRAM compared with the 5080's 16GB. How noticeable would the downgrade be in demanding games such as Cyberpunk and Wukong with DLSS 4 enabled? Is 16GB likely to remain sufficient for 4K gaming over the next two or three years? Given the unusually high used prices, would you sell now or keep the 5090 until a future generation? I would appreciate opinions from anyone who has actually moved from a 5090 to a 5080.
4 Answers
Unless you are using the card for local AI, rendering, or another VRAM-heavy task, a 5080 should be perfectly usable for current games with DLSS. However, I would only make the downgrade if you genuinely need the £2,000 or already feel the 5090 is excessive. Selling hardware purely because it might be near its peak can lead to regret if you later miss the extra performance, especially at 4K with ray tracing.
I would keep the 5090. A 35–40% frame-rate reduction is not just a benchmark difference when you are aiming for high-refresh 4K gaming; a game running around 60 fps could end up closer to 40 fps. The 32GB of VRAM also gives you much more breathing room for future textures, ray tracing, mods, and other demanding workloads.
The current price may be an unusually good exit opportunity, but it is still speculation. The 5090 could become cheaper once supply improves, or prices could rise further. If you sell, I would avoid paying full price for an extravagant 5080 model like the Astral. A cheaper 5080 should perform nearly the same, letting you keep more of the difference.
That is a good point. If I make the switch, buying a less expensive 5080 rather than paying extra for the Astral would make the financial case much stronger.
If you do not use the 5090 for local AI or other VRAM-heavy workloads, selling it could be reasonable. A 5080 should still provide a strong 4K experience, especially with DLSS, although you should expect a substantial performance drop in demanding titles. The bigger question is whether having £2,000 available matters more to you than consistently getting the highest frame rates.
That is exactly what I am struggling with. I am not desperate for the money, but the margin is so large that I keep wondering whether I am wasting the 5090’s potential.
Future cards will eventually be faster, but launch pricing and availability are impossible to predict. I would not sell a card you already enjoy purely on the assumption that the next generation will be a better deal.