The NVIDIA RTX 5050 is the objective winner of this comparison, securing victory in seven out of eleven evaluated specifications. Its most significant advantage over the NVIDIA GTX 1080 is its support for AV1 encoding, which represents a 100% improvement in this capability. While the older card maintains a lead in memory bus width, the newer model dominates the majority of the technical categories, establishing itself as the more modern and capable hardware option for current systems.

Users who prioritize modern media processing should choose the NVIDIA RTX 5050 to take advantage of its superior AV1 encoding capabilities. Conversely, the NVIDIA GTX 1080 remains a viable selection for specific workflows that rely heavily on a wider memory bus, where it maintains a 100% advantage. Buyers should weigh the importance of modern encoding standards against the specific memory bus requirements of their intended applications when deciding between these two graphics cards.