Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Ultra W OC VS Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Vulcan OC

At their core, both the Ultra W OC and Vulcan OC share identical foundational hardware: the same 10,752 shading units, 336 TMUs, 112 ROPs, and a base clock of 2295 MHz — confirming they are built on the exact same GPU die with no architectural distinction between them. The real differentiator lives at the top end of the clock range.

The Vulcan OC reaches a boost clock of 2695 MHz versus the Ultra W OC's 2655 MHz — a 40 MHz advantage that cascades into every throughput metric. The Vulcan OC delivers 57.95 TFLOPS of floating-point performance against 57.09 TFLOPS, a texture rate of 905.5 GTexels/s versus 892.1 GTexels/s, and a pixel rate of 301.8 GPixel/s compared to 297.4 GPixel/s. In practice, these roughly 1.5% gaps are imperceptible in any real-world gaming or rendering workload — no benchmark would reliably separate them at the frame level.

The Vulcan OC holds a technical edge on paper in this group, purely by virtue of its higher factory boost clock. However, the margin is so slim that it carries no meaningful real-world consequence. Both cards are effectively performance-equivalent, and a user choosing between them should look to other spec groups — such as cooling, power, or connectivity — rather than raw compute numbers to make their decision.

Memory is one area where these two cards are in complete lockstep. Both the Ultra W OC and Vulcan OC carry 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM across a 256-bit bus, hitting an effective memory speed of 30,000 MHz and a peak bandwidth of 960 GB/s — there is not a single differentiating data point between them here.

The specs themselves are worth contextualizing. GDDR7 represents a generational leap in memory efficiency and throughput over GDDR6X, and 960 GB/s of bandwidth is substantial — enough to feed even the most texture- and geometry-heavy workloads at 4K without creating a memory bottleneck. The 16GB frame buffer is well-suited for high-resolution gaming and most professional creative tasks, though users working with extremely large AI models or multi-display 8K rendering may eventually feel its limits. ECC memory support is a practical bonus for workstation use cases, adding a layer of data integrity that matters in compute-heavy or mission-critical environments.

This group is an unambiguous tie. Memory configuration cannot be a deciding factor between these two cards — anyone weighing them against each other should look elsewhere in the spec sheet for differentiation.

Feature parity is total between the Ultra W OC and Vulcan OC — every capability listed is shared identically across both cards. The headline additions worth understanding are ray tracing and DLSS support. Ray tracing enables physically accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections in supported titles, while DLSS uses AI-based upscaling to recover frame rates lost to ray tracing overhead — together, they form the core of NVIDIA's modern visual fidelity pipeline and are essential for anyone targeting the highest graphical presets in current-generation games.

DirectX 12 Ultimate is the other noteworthy flag here, as it is the prerequisite for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and variable-rate shading in games built on modern rendering engines. Support for up to 4 simultaneous displays and multi-display technology adds flexibility for productivity-focused users or sim enthusiasts running wide setups. Intel Resizable BAR is also present on both, allowing the CPU to access the full GPU frame buffer at once rather than in small chunks — a feature that yields modest but real performance gains in select titles without any user configuration.

With no feature exclusive to either card, this group is a straightforward tie. The software and API capabilities of both models are completely interchangeable, and feature set alone gives no grounds for preferring one over the other.

Port layout is where these two cards finally diverge in a tangible, practical way. Both share three DisplayPort outputs and a single HDMI 2.1b port — but the Vulcan OC adds a second HDMI port, bringing its total output count to five versus the Ultra W OC's four.

The real-world significance depends entirely on the user's display setup. For the vast majority of gamers running one or two monitors, this difference is invisible. However, for users who mix HDMI-native devices — such as a TV alongside a gaming monitor, or a capture card and a display simultaneously — having two HDMI ports eliminates the need for an adapter or a switcher, which is a genuine convenience advantage. It is also worth noting that HDMI 2.1b on both cards supports the bandwidth needed for 4K at high refresh rates and 8K output, so the quality of each HDMI connection is identical; only the quantity differs.

The Vulcan OC holds a clear edge in this group. The extra HDMI port is a niche but real advantage for multi-display users with HDMI-dependent hardware, and it costs the Vulcan OC nothing in DisplayPort flexibility since that count remains the same on both cards.

Underneath the branding, both cards are built on the same Blackwell architecture using a 5nm process with an identical 45.6 billion transistors — confirming they are the same silicon. The differences that emerge in this group are physical rather than architectural, and they carry genuine implications for system builders.

The most consequential gap is power draw. The Ultra W OC is rated at 380W TDP while the Vulcan OC steps up to 400W — a 20W difference that, in isolation, seems minor but is directly tied to the Vulcan OC's higher boost clock seen in the Performance group. That extra headroom enables the higher turbo frequency, but it also demands more from the power supply and generates marginally more heat under sustained load. Users running tight PSU configurations should factor this in. Physical size tells a similar story: the Vulcan OC measures 360 × 148.9 mm against the Ultra W OC's 331 × 139.3 mm, making it noticeably larger in both length and height. In compact or mid-tower cases, that 29mm length difference can be the deciding factor between a card that fits and one that doesn't.

Neither card uses air-water hybrid cooling, so thermal management falls entirely on the air cooler — and the Vulcan OC's larger footprint likely reflects a more substantial cooling solution to handle its higher TDP. For users with spacious full-tower cases and robust power supplies, this is a non-issue. For everyone else, the Ultra W OC holds a practical advantage in this group: lower power consumption and a smaller physical envelope make it the more system-friendly option, without sacrificing the same underlying silicon.