The best argument for grabbing a 5080 right now, if you can find one at $999 in the first place, is that the only cards that come close to its performance are either way more expensive than they're supposed to be (the 4080 Super) or not cheap enough to justify the Nvidia-specific features you give up (AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX).

Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU is expected to be one of the most elusive GPUs to date at launch and based on the information available to us, it would be challenging for most users to score one even with the best of efforts this quarter.

I spent a week extensively testing the RTX 5080, and overall it's the best premium graphics card for most people you can get right now.