Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review: Brutally fast, but DLSS 4 is the game changer

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• By far the fastest gaming performance ever, even ray traced
• DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation makes games so snappy and smooth, they feel like new — it’s truly game-changing
• Huge 32GB of GDDR7 with tons of bandwidth
• Tightly engineered Founders Edition model somehow squeezes into a fairly quiet two-slot design

Cons

• Bro, it’s $2,000
• $500 premium over 4090
• Significant power increase requires 1,000W power supply
• GPU temp hits 84 degrees Celsius under load

Our Verdict

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 is the most brutally fast graphics card ever introduced, augmented by new DLSS 4 technology that feels like magic. But you pay dearly for it, and it feels like this GPU was designed more for AI researchers than PC gamers.

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The wait is finally over. The long-awaited GeForce RTX 5090 lands on store shelves in January — and friends, the flagship graphics card for Nvidia’s new “Blackwell” architecture is an absolute monster.

It should be for $2,000, of course. While the RTX 5090’s leap in raw gaming performance isn’t anywhere as massive as the 4090’s was over its predecessor, it blows the pants off any GPU we’ve ever seen before, with no notable flaws in its technical configuration.

But while raw gaming performance is welcome, I suspect that the GeForce RTX 50-series will live or die on the back of DLSS 4, a new generation of Nvidia’s vaunted AI-powered performance-boosting technologies. A lot of Blackwell’s improvements were focused on Nvidia’s AI tensor cores, and Blackwell was designed hand-in-hand to optimize DLSS 4. And hot damn, friends. Based on our early playtime, DLSS 4’s new Multi Frame Generation AI technology can feel like black magic, utterly changing the way games feel to play. It’s amazing, full stop.

Check out our embedded video review below for an in-depth analysis of every benchmark we ran and plenty of additional experiential information. This written review will focus on key things would-be RTX 5090 buyers need to know before slapping down $2,000 for the most badass graphics card ever built.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is badass at everything

When we covered (and then analyzed!) the specifications for Nvidia’s initial GeForce RTX 50-series lineup, one thing jumped out: The GeForce RTX 5090 was the clear crown jewel, designed with virtually no technical flaws. That bears out in our testing.

With 33 percent more CUDA cores than the RTX 4090, new RT and tensor AI cores, and more raw power being pumped through its digital veins, there was never any doubt the 5090 would whup on its predecessor in gaming. (Much more on that in the next section.) Its ginormous 32GB of bleeding-edge GDDR7 memory, built with a wide 512-bit bus, will be able to tackle any gaming task you throw at it, regardless of resolution.

But the RTX 5090 is more than just a gaming behemoth.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

We live in an era where GPUs do serious work on AI tasks now, not just gaming. Nvidia optimized its Blackwell architecture to excel at AI workloads, while the RTX 5090’s unrivaled memory configuration can hold much larger AI models than any prior GPU. The results in Procyon’s AI Text Generation benchmark are nothing short of sparkling.

In the “worst case” scenario, with the Phi 3.5 large language model, the RTX 5090 is about 19 percent faster than the 4090; in the best case scenario, Meta’s Llama 3.1, performance jumped 32 percent. AI researchers and engineers will be scrambling to pick this up.

The GeForce RTX 5090 is also a content creation powerhouse. It houses an additional media encoding engine, bringing its total up to three, while the massive memory pool helps with the creation and editing of complex projects.

We were only able to run a couple of Adobe benchmarks from Puget Systems’ excellent PugetBench for this initial review. All modern high-end GPUs offer roughly the same performance in Photoshop (no surprise there), but the RTX 5090 is 8 percent faster than the 4090 in Premiere Pro. Expect that margin to jump with more GPU-centric creation software, like DaVinci Resolve, or if your workloads utilize ray tracing or can tap into Nvidia’s excellent DLSS technologies.

There’s a reason we’re talking about this first: The GeForce RTX 5090 is much more than just a gaming card, like a more amplified version of the 4090 before it. People who use their PCs for real work will be clamoring for this monster GeForce GPU to make real money using it. The RTX 4090 has sold for closer to $2,500 than its $1,600 suggested price for years now, and I expect the demand will be even stronger for the titanic 5090 with its fast, massive memory pool and AI optimizations. This will sell lot hotcakes — yes, even at $1,999, which I suspect will look like an absolute steal a few months from now.

But if you are able to snag one, you’ll have your hands on by far the fastest gaming GPU of all time. Onto the fun stuff.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 gaming benchmarks: Brutally fast

The GeForce RTX 4090 stood unopposed as the ultimate gaming GPU since the moment it launched. No longer. The new Blackwell generation uses the same underlying TSMC 4N process technology as the RTX 40-series, so Nvidia couldn’t squeeze easy improvements there. Instead, the company overhauled the RTX 5090’s instruction pipeline, endowed it with 33 percent more CUDA cores, and pushed it to a staggering 575W TGP, up from the 4090’s 450W. Blackwell also introduced a new generation of RT and AI cores.

Add it all up and the RTX 5090 is an unparalleled gaming beast — though the effects hit different depending on whether or not you’re using RTX features like ray tracing and DLSS.

Our gaming benchmark suite tests titles utilizing a variety of different game engines, to try to get a well-rounded view of performance. We’ve decided to focus on 4K gaming performance given this $2,000 graphics card’s might.

In games that don’t use ray tracing or DLSS, simply brute force graphics rendering, the RTX 5090 isn’t much more than a mild generational performance upgrade. It runs an average of 27 percent faster in those games — but the splits swing wildly depending on the game: Cyberpunk 2077 is 50 percent faster, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is 32 percent faster, and Rainbox Six Siege is 28 percent faster, but Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 only pick up 15 and 12 percent more performance, respectively.

Performance results are less of a yo-yo once you flip on ray tracing, DLSS upscaling (not Frame Generation), or some mix of the two. Black Myth Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, and Returnal all run ~30 percent faster on the RTX 5090 versus the 4090, while F1 24 leapt up 40 percent.

Nvidia invested heavily engineering work into its ray tracing and tensor cores this generation, and it shows. You should not pick up the RTX 5090 if you plan on ignoring ray tracing and DLSS in games (unless you plan on using it for work, of course).

But sweet holy moly, you shouldn’t ignore DLSS 4 anyway.

DLSS 4 is a literal game-changer

Much like DLSS, DLSS 2, and DLSS 3 before it, the new DLSS 4 generation is an absolute game-changer. Nvidia’s boundary-pushing AI tech continues to look better, run faster, and now feel smoother. It’s insane.

Nvidia made two monumental changes to DLSS to coincide with the RTX 50-series release. First, all DLSS games will be switching to a new “Transformer” model from the older “Convolutional Neural Network” behind the scenes, on all RTX GPUs going back to the 20-series.

More crucially for the RTX 5090 (and future 50-series offerings), DLSS 4 adds a new Multi Frame Generation technology, building upon the success of DLSS 3 Frame Gen. While DLSS 3 uses tensor cores to insert a single AI-generated frame between GPU-rendered frames, supercharging performance, MFG inserts three AI frames between each GPU-rendered frame (which itself may only be rendering an image at quarter resolution, then using DLSS Super Resolution to upscale that to fit your screen).

It’s AI all the way down, just like we predicted. As someone who is sensitive to latency, I was skeptical going in. But friends, DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation feels fantastic in our limited playtesting in a handful of games.