Most benchmarks confirm what the price tag already told you. The latest from Puget Systems, the workstation builder whose labs publish their test results, contains one that doesn't. Testing the Starlight AI models in Topaz Video, which upscale and restore video, Puget found that in the model called Starlight Fast 2 a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, a card that launched at $429, edged out an RTX 5080, which launched at $999.
The test, published on 11 September by Puget's Peter Emery, is simple enough to follow. Take 60 frames of 1080p H.264 video at 23.976 frames per second, about two and a half seconds, upscale it 2x to 4K, export it five times back to back as ProRes 422 LT, and measure the seconds each frame takes. Every card ran in the same AMD Threadripper PRO 9965WX workstation, on Windows 11 with Topaz Video 1.6.1 and NVIDIA's 610.62 driver.
In three of the four Starlight models the results ran the way you would expect. In Starlight Mini the RTX 5090 took about 8 seconds a frame and the RTX 5080 about 13, with the RTX 5070 Ti about 10% behind the 5080; the RTX 5070 took about 20 seconds and the RTX 5060 Ti nearly 27. Starlight Sharp put the 5090 at just over a second, the 5080 and 5070 Ti in a near tie under 3 seconds, and the 5060 Ti at about 5. In Precise 2.5, the only one of the four that also runs on AMD cards, the 5090 took 5 seconds, the 5080 was 37% slower, and AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT took just over 54 seconds, more than three times as long as the slowest NVIDIA card.
Starlight Fast 2 broke the pattern. The 5090 again took just over a second a frame. But the 5060 Ti, the 5070 Ti and the 5080 all landed between 14 and 16 seconds, and the 5060 Ti came out slightly ahead of the 5080, a card with far more computing power.
| Model | Runs on | RTX 5090 | RTX 5080 | RTX 5070 Ti | RTX 5060 Ti |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starlight Mini | NVIDIA only | about 8 | about 13 | about 10% slower than the 5080 | nearly 27 |
| Starlight Sharp | NVIDIA, 16GB or more | just over 1 | under 3 | under 3, nearly tied with the 5080 | about 5 |
| Starlight Fast 2 | NVIDIA, 16GB or more | just over 1 | 14 to 16 | 14 to 16 | 14 to 16, slightly ahead of the 5080 |
| Starlight Precise 2.5 | NVIDIA or AMD | 5 | 37% slower than the 5090 | about 20% behind the 5080 | 20% slower than the RTX 5070 |
What those three cards share is memory. Fast 2 needs at least 16GB of video memory, which is why Puget left the 12GB RTX 5070 out, and the 5060 Ti, 5070 Ti and 5080 each have exactly 16GB. The 5090 has 32GB. Puget is careful about what it concludes: "This result could point to a memory bottleneck." Its reading is that when memory is what limits the work, a fast card like the 5080 loses more of its advantage than a slower one like the 5060 Ti, because more of its computing power is left with nothing to do.
A bottleneck is simply the slowest step in a process, and speeding up any other step changes nothing. A graphics card can only compute on data it holds in its own memory, so if the work is limited by memory rather than by the processor, three cards with the same 16GB hit the same wall and their extra cores stop mattering. That is what Fast 2 looks like. The 5090, with twice the memory, finished a frame in just over a second against 14 to 16 seconds for the other three, which fits the theory, although it also has far more computing power, so on its own it cannot prove it. Puget has not published memory measurements, so the explanation stays a strong possibility rather than a finding.
For anyone choosing a card for AI video work, the lesson is that memory decides first what you can run at all, and then, sometimes, how fast. The 12GB RTX 5070 could not run two of the four Starlight models, and in the one most limited by memory, the cheapest 16GB card here kept pace with cards that launched at up to twice its price and more. It is one application, one clip and one lab, and Puget's own conclusion is hedged. Still, it is a good reason to check how much memory a card has before counting its cores. And at today's prices the gap is wider than the launch prices suggest: TechSpot's September tracking found the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB at about $730 in the US and the RTX 5080 at about $1,550.