"Fake" frames to fake GPUs? Nvidia apparently just sold RTX 5080 as 5090 from official store

It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Nvidia's RTX 50 series (Blackwell) launch has been a mess. The company hyped its new cards, especially the RTX 5070, far beyond what they actually merited, leading to soft damage control later, before the eventual truth came out.

And besides the overhyped and misleading claims about performance, Team Green's GPUs are also suffering from a major lack of stock with major retailers confirming the acute under-stock of cards.

Aside from that, hardware and software issues are also affecting the new 5000 series GPUs. There are reports of bricked RTX 5090(D) graphics cards and also PCIe Gen5 compatibility problems. Besides these, Windows may fail to recognize a new 50 series card.

We wondered in our last piece whether the launch could go any more south and that may just have happened. A Reddit user says that they purchased an RTX 5080 card, a Founder's edition or the reference edition, from the Nvidia official store, only to find that the GPU was labeled as the "RTX 5090" on the shroud.

The Redditor EssDee3D wrote:

I ordered a 5080 and I got a graphics card with 5090 engraved on it. The outer box has the 5080 SKU on it.

The user has also uploaded a short video clip of the GPU since many others online refused to believe them. The video shows that Windows Task Manager and GPU-Z correctly identify it as the RTX 5080. They wrote:

There's a lot of people saying I faked this when I posted this to see if anyone else had the same thing happen. It's easier to just upload a quick YouTube short of it plugged in and what the screen reads for the people who are curious.

It's almost as if Nvidia managed to actually create a running community joke where users wished there was some technology like DLSS that could build new GPUs out of thin air in order to address the low stock situation similar to how DLSS can extrapolate and generate "fake" frames.

While this issue is not a major one, it does highlight quality control problems that the tech giant is clearly struggling with at the moment, adding to the already existing list of issues plaguing the RTX 5000 series.