Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition specifications:
CUDA Cores: 21,760 Base Clock Speed: 2.01GHz Boost Clock Speed: 2.14GHz VRAM: 32GB GDDR7 Power: 575W Recommended System Power: 1000W Price: £1939 / $1999
Dear readers, I spent two full days in the benchmark pit telling you what you’ve already guessed. The GeForce RTX 5090 is extremely fast, overpriced, and has more AI technology than Philip K. Dick’s cheesy dreams. I’m confident that at least two of these points will drive the average graphics card buyer. Especially now that even game developers are starting to question generative AI and its many-thumbed, robot-voiced opinions.
Still, there’s not much you can do about the RTX 5090’s price tag of at least £1939/$1999, hundreds more than the notoriously expensive RTX 4090, but its more purely performance-focused artificial intelligence The tool suite is, dare I say it, very good. These features range from Multi-Frame Generation (MFG), which is essentially DLSS 3 frame generation but up to 2x faster, to general upscaling enhancements in DLSS 4, and even the ability to apply new DLSS versions to older games. It covers a wide range of things. All of this applies to the rest of the RTX 50 series as well, with some trickling down into the RTX range, so perhaps the RTX 5090 is a Piccadilly Square rather than a practical GPU purchase in its own right. It is best understood as an advertisement that fills a . Brothers can do it more affordably.
There’s definitely a sense in this that NVIDIA is doing a “Sod it”, turning off the emotional brakes and producing something that even enthusiasts may find a little too crazy. . For the price, this is the most PSU-hungry product to ever wear the GeForce badge. The Founders Edition I tested overcame this threat, although it claims a whopping 1000W of power and is rated to deliver up to 575W of power at a time. Cyberpunk 2077 consumed 578W. By comparison, the RTX 4090, rated at 450W, looks like it could be powered by a potato. Thanks to a redesigned dual-fan cooler to keep temperatures in check, the peak temperature we measured was still a very manageable 74°c.
In that regard, if there’s one thing the RTX 5090 does brilliantly without AI caveats, it’s the industrial design. In fact, this might be the prettiest graphics card I’ve ever seen in my life, although I’ll admit it’s not a high bar. Modern yet mature, it’s a precision-cut slice of aluminum. And unlike the RTX 4090 FE, it’s not large enough to be considered from an era when computers required their own cupboards. To be exact, it’s definitely 2 cm thinner, finally arresting and reversing the trend of ever-bulging premium GPUs.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review: 4K benchmarks
Like the RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 before it, Ultra HD is the RTX 5090’s spiritual home. Since I had all three on hand, I introduced a new test rig I tried with an Intel Arc B580 paired with 16 GB of DDR5 RAM and an Intel Core i9-13900K.
The RTX 5090 is easily the fastest new card of all in terms of unmodified native Rez gaming performance, not to mention frame generation gubbins. This is the first time I’ve broken 100fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with these settings, and as long as you have at least a 144Hz monitor (relatively not a big ask if you can afford a £2,000 worth of graphics card), your eyes will be fine. You will be able to see an image that looks like this. It outperforms the RTX 4090 in other difficult games like Total War: Warhammer III and F1 24.
Nevertheless, we can’t ignore that the jump from RTX 4090 to RTX 5090 isn’t as big or consistent as the former’s improvement over RTX 3090. Nvidia’s top two GPUs are pretty much tied for Horizon Forbidden West and Assassin’s Creed Mirage. , and once you start adding upscaling, the difference remains insignificant. For example, DLSS at the quality level of Forbidden West reached up to 137 fps on the RTX 5090 and 125 fps on the RTX 4090, which isn’t a huge jump.
RPS test PC:
CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K RAM: 16GB Crucial DDR5 Pro Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero PSU: NZXT C1000 Gold
On the other hand, the RTX 5090’s Blackwell architecture seems to be a little better at dealing with the performance degradation caused by ray tracing. This was already one of Nvidia’s strong suits. After enabling Ultra High Quality RT effects, Metro Exodus dropped from 163fps to 117fps on RTX 5090 and from 135fps to 87fps on RTX 4090. That’s a reduction of 28% and 36%, respectively.
Then there’s DLSS 4 and its most popular component, multi-frame generation. This works similarly to the frame generation that DLSS 3 introduced on the 40 series. The card takes data from the frames that the GPU is rendering and uses AI to generate similar frames that can be inserted between the rendered frames, increasing the overall frame rate. Instead, a small amount of input delay is added. However, while the DLSS 3 version creates at most one AI frame for each rendered frame, MSG produces three or four AI frames, resulting in a scene like this:
It’s certainly an RTX 5090 running fully path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II at 4K and 200fps as far as the eye can see. And importantly, 4x MFG does not significantly increase the latency already introduced with traditional 2x frame generation, nor does it degrade in terms of image quality.
I’m not saying it’s perfect magic. Input lag is input lag, and MFG doesn’t make this trade-off significantly worse, but it doesn’t make it any better either. Also, in Cyberpunk 2077, rapidly moving cameras can get quite blurry. To be fair, we didn’t have this problem with AW2 or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but it’s important to remember that no matter how many imitation frames the AI generator can create . Plus, these games never feel fast when you hold them in your hand. That 218fps only moves like a mouse in a 64fps game. These frames (those delivered via the normal PC pipeline) are the only frames that can accurately reflect the input.
With all that in mind, the visual smoothness has been significantly upgraded, and if you’re not playing something that requires ultra-accurate twitch aiming, why wouldn’t you? If your GPU is powerful enough to get comfortable “real” frame rates from the highest quality settings, such as path tracing, then frame generation is a luxury it should be. It’s not a crutch that games without proper low-end settings can use to bump up their numbers.
MFG is also just part of DLSS 4, covering various tricks that may and may not be exclusive to this new Nvidia generation. Therefore, the RTX 5090 is also obliged to introduce technologies that benefit GPUs dating back to the RTX 20 series, such as the new “Transformer” model for DLSS 4 and support for “DLSS Override” in Nvidia apps.
First, the Transformer model is a recalibration of how DLSS applies best-in-class antialiasing. It was slightly slower than the existing “Convolutional Neural Network” model, averaging 120fps at 4K/Ultra in Cyberpunk 2077, compared to 132fps in older versions. However, it looks sharper and more detailed. Many of Nvidia’s promotional comparison images focus on textures, but what I found most notable was the improvement in fine-edged objects such as grass and wire mesh. DLSS already seemed to outperform rivals FSR and XeSS in these regards, but the Transformer model makes them even cleaner and sharper, bringing the overall picture closer than ever to true native Rez quality. Masu. It’s good.
Second, DLSS overrides can be very effective in bringing newer and better versions of DLSS to games that don’t have updated support or lack support in the first place. We still need some level of support in Nvidia apps, but we can’t apply DLSS 4 to everything ever made. But with 75 compatible games included at launch, the options are surprisingly flexible. For example, you can force games that don’t have it officially implemented to use DLAA antialiasing, or you can upgrade games that support convolutional neural network DLSS to the new Transformer model. Also, if you have a 50-series GPU like this one, you can also run games with DLSS 3 frame generation at full 4x MFG, as we did with Dragon Age: The Veilguard to get the benchmark results above. You can.
I still don’t see the value in much of what Nvidia is doing with AI, right down to their attempts to create creepy, artless NPCs. But riding on these DLSS advances is much easier. DLSS advances devalue nothing, steal from nowhere, and can breathe life into old hardware just as much as they can enrich new hardware.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review: 1440p benchmark
But before you get too lovey-dovey, let me remind you once again about the RTX 5090’s limitations. Buying a top-of-the-line GPU and connecting it to an undemanding 1440p screen may seem like building a galactic brain setup to some. The PC is the equivalent of a Fiat with a giant engine that sticks out in the back because it won’t fit inside. In fact, if your rigmobile doesn’t match, it will just crash into a CPU bottleneck.
Again, the RTX 3090 is far behind, but at this resolution the RTX 5090 is effectively only as good as the GPU it replaces. Taking full advantage of ray tracing could widen the gap again, but the results are still underwhelming. Cyberpunk 2077 with Psycho RT effects and high-quality DLSS averaged 124 fps on RTX 5090 and 111 fps on RTX 4090. How to get an extra 11fps for cash? No big deal. MFG doesn’t help much here either. There are already so many frames shoved in front of you that generating twice as many frames as normal would be more than the support game would notice.
No, RTX 5090 is 4K capable. But trying to make this type of card practical seems like a waste of time. Yes, there was once a GTX 1080 Ti and an RTX 2080 Ti, GPUs that were somewhat attainable, high-end, but beyond the range. I miss those days too. But in any case, isn’t the RTX 5090 a rather ambitious device? A concept model that just happened to sneak out of the design stage and into production plants?
To be honest, you probably weren’t going to buy this. I had no intention of buying this. Even those who might buy this when they’re probably not busy executing generals should at least be looking at the RTX 5080. It’s so far beyond our common sense that there doesn’t seem to be much point in hating it either. The GPU itself doesn’t care, and Nvidia certainly doesn’t. Perhaps they are already planning to sell the RTX 6090 for £2,500.
Instead, let’s look at what this actually is. This is an eye-catching exercise in DLSS features that are likely to be much more talked about than a single graphics card. The RTX 5090 will get me there even if I’m not getting paid for it.
This review is based on the retail unit provided by the manufacturer.
