The most telling performance gap between these two cards lies in their raw compute and rasterization hardware. The MSI RTX 5080 Expert OC fields 10,752 shading units against the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Aero OC's 6,144 — a 75% advantage — and this scales directly into floating-point throughput: 58.38 TFLOPS versus 32.26 TFLOPS. In practice, that gap translates to meaningfully higher frame rates in GPU-bound scenarios, faster shader-heavy effects like ray tracing and volumetric lighting, and greater headroom for high-resolution workloads. The 5080 also leads in texture throughput (912.2 GTexels/s vs 504 GTexels/s) and pixel fill rate (304.1 GPixel/s vs 210 GPixel/s), meaning it can push more textured geometry and resolve more pixels per second — advantages that become increasingly visible at 4K or with anti-aliasing enabled.
Clock speeds tell a more nuanced story. The 5070 Aero OC holds a marginally higher base clock (2325 MHz vs 2295 MHz), but the 5080 Expert OC pulls ahead at boost (2715 MHz vs 2625 MHz), which is the frequency that matters most under sustained gaming or rendering loads. The 5080 also runs faster memory at 1875 MHz versus 1750 MHz, which feeds its wider and more numerous execution units with data more efficiently. Both cards support Double Precision Floating Point, making them usable for mixed-precision compute tasks beyond gaming.
The RTX 5080 Expert OC holds a decisive performance advantage in every meaningful compute and rasterization metric. The 5070 Aero OC is not a slow card — its ~32 TFLOPS and 504 GTexels/s still represent strong mid-to-high-end throughput — but for users targeting maximum frame rates at 4K, heavy ray tracing, or GPU-accelerated creative workloads, the 5080's nearly 2× compute lead makes it the clear winner in this category.
