Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: the supercar of graphics cards

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Two-minute review

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is a difficult GPU to approach as a professional reviewer because it is the rare consumer product that is so powerful, and so good at what it does, you have to really examine if it is actually a useful product for people to buy.

Right out the gate, let me just lay it out for you: depending on the workload, this GPU can get you up to 50% better performance versus the GeForce RTX 4090, and that’s not even factoring in multi-frame generation when it comes to gaming, though on average the performance is still a respectable improvement of roughly 21% overall.

Simply put, whatever it is you’re looking to use it for, whether gaming, creative work, or AI research and development, this is the best graphics card for the job if all you care about is pure performance.

Things get a bit more complicated if you want to bring energy efficiency into the equation. But if we’re being honest, if you’re considering buying the Nvidia RTX 5090, you don’t care about energy efficiency. This simply isn’t that kind of card, and so as much as I want to make energy efficiency an issue in this review, I really can’t. It’s not intended to be efficient, and those who want this card do not care about how much energy this thing is pulling down—in fact, for many, the enormous TDP on this card is part of its appeal.

Likewise, I can’t really argue too much with the card’s price, which comes in at $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039 for the Founders Edition, and which will likely be much higher for AIB partner cards (and that’s before the inevitable scalping begins). I could rage, rage against the inflation of the price of premium GPUs all I want, but honestly, Nvidia wouldn’t charge this much for this card if there wasn’t a line out the door and around the block full of enthusiasts who are more than willing to pay that kind of money for this thing on day one.

Do they get their money’s worth? For the most part, yes, especially if they’re not a gamer but a creative professional or AI researcher. If you’re in the latter camp, you’re going to be very excited about this card.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll still get impressive gen-on-gen performance improvements over the celebrated RTX 4090, and the Nvidia RTX 5090 is really the first consumer graphics card I’ve tested that can get you consistent, high-framerate 8K gameplay even before factoring in Multi-Frame Generation. That marks the RTX 5090 as something of an inflection point of things to come, much like the Nvidia RTX 2080 did back in 2018 with its first-of-its-kind hardware ray tracing.

Is it worth it though?

That, ultimately, is up to the enthusiast buyer who is looking to invest in this card. At this point, you probably already know whether or not you want it, and many will likely be reading this review to validate those decisions that have already been made.

In that, rest easy. Even without the bells and whistles of DLSS 4, this card is a hearty upgrade to the RTX 4090, and considering that the actual price of the RTX 4090 has hovered around $2,000 for the better part of two years despite its $1,599 MSRP, if the RTX 5090 sticks close to its launch price, it’s well worth the investment. If it gets scalped to hell and sells for much more above that, you’ll need to consider your purchase much more carefully to make sure you’re getting the most for your money. Make sure to check out our where to buy an RTX 5090 guide to help you find stock when it goes on sale.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Price & availability

• How much is it? MSRP is $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039
• When can you get it? The RTX 5090 goes on sale January 30, 2025
• Where is it available? The RTX 5090 will be available in the US, UK, and Australia at launch

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 goes on sale on January 30, 2025, starting at $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039 for the Nvidia Founders Edition and select AIB partner cards. Overclocked (OC) and other similarly tweaked cards and designs will obviously run higher.

It’s worth noting that the RTX 5090 is 25% more expensive than the $1,599 launch price of the RTX 4090, but in reality, we can expect the RTX 5090 to sell for much higher than its MSRP in the months ahead, so we’re really looking at an asking price closer to the $2,499.99 MSRP of the Turing-era Nvidia Titan RTX (if you’re lucky).

Of course, if you’re in the market for the Nvidia RTX 5090, you’re probably not squabbling too much about the price of the card. You’re already expecting to pay the premium, especially the first adopter premium, that comes with this release.

That said, this is still a ridiculously expensive graphics card for anyone other than an AI startup with VC backing, so it’s worth asking yourself before you confirm that purchase if this card is truly the right card for your system and setup.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Specs & features

• First GPU with GDDR7 VRAM and PCIe 5.0
• Slightly slower clocks
• Obscene 575W TDP

There are a lot of new architectural changes in the Nvidia RTX 50 series GPUs that are worth diving into, especially the move to a transformer AI model for its upscaling, but let’s start with the new specs for the RTX 5090.

First and foremost, the flagship Blackwell GPU is the first consumer graphics card to feature next-gen GDDR7 video memory, and it is substantially faster than GDDR6 and GDDR6X (a roughly 33% increase in Gbps over the RTX 4090). Add in the much wider 512-bit memory interface and you have a total memory bandwidth of 1,790GB/s.

This, more than even the increases VRAM pool of 32GB vs 24GB for the RTX 4090, makes this GPU the first really capable 8K graphics card on the market. 8K textures have an enormous footprint in memory, so moving them through the rendering pipelines to generate playable framerates isn’t really possible with anything less than this card has.

Yes, you can, maybe, get playable 8K gaming with some RTX 40 or AMD Radeon RX 7000 series cards if you use aggressive upscaling, but you won’t really be getting 8K visuals that’ll be worth the effort. In reality, the RTX 5090 is what you want if you want to play 8K, but good luck finding an 8K monitor at this point. Those are still years away from really going mainstream (though there are a growing number of 8K TVs).

If you’re settling in at 4K though, you’re in for a treat, since all that bandwidth means faster 4K texture processing, so you can get very fast native 4K gaming with this card without having to fall back on upscaling tech to get you to 60fps or higher.

The clock speeds on the RTX 5090 are slightly slower, which is good, because the other major top-line specs for the RTX 5090 are its gargantuan TDP of 575W and its PCIe 5.0 x16 interface. For the TDP, this thermal challenge, according to Nvidia, required major reengineering of the PCB inside the card, which I’ll get to in a bit.

The PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, meanwhile, is the first of its kind in a consumer GPU, though you can expect AMD and Intel to quickly follow suit. Why this matters is because a number of newer motherboards have PCIe 5.0 lanes ready to go, but most people have been using those for PCIe 5.0 m.2 SSDs.

If your motherboard has 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes, the RTX 5090 will take up 16 of those, leaving just four for your SSD. If you have one PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD, you should be fine, but I’ve seen motherboard configurations that have two or three PCIe 5.0 x4 m.2 slots, so if you’ve got one of those and you’ve loaded them up with PCIe 5.0 SSDs, you’re likely to see those SSDs drop down to the slower PCIe 4.0 speeds. I don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal, but it’s worth considering if you’ve invested a lot into your SSD storage.

As for the other specs, they’re more or less similar to what you’d find in the RTX 4090, just more of it. The new Blackwell GB202 GPU in the RTX 5090 is built on a TSMC 4nm process, compared to the RTX 4090’s TSMC 5nm AD102 GPU. The SM design is the same, so 128 CUDA cores, one ray tracing core, and four tensor cores per SM. At 170 SMs, you’ve got 21,760 CUDA cores, 170 RT cores, and 680 Tensor cores for the RTX 5090, compared to the RTX 4090’s 128 SMs (so 16,384 CUDA, 128 RT, and 512 Tensor cores).

• Specs & features: 4.5 / 5

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Design

• Slim, dual-slot form factor
• Better cooling

So there’s a significant change to this generation of Nvidia Founders Edition RTX flagship cards in terms of design, and it’s not insubstantial.

Holding the RTX 5090 Founders Edition in your hand, you’ll immediately notice two things: first, you can comfortably hold it in one hand thanks to it being a dual-slot card rather than a triple-slot, and second, it’s significantly lighter than the RTX 4090.

A big part of this is how Nvidia designed the PCB inside the card. Traditionally, graphics cards have been built with a single PCB that extends from the inner edge of the PC case, down through the PCIe slot, and far enough back to accommodate all of the modules needed for the card. On top of this PCB, you’ll have a heatsink with piping from the GPU die itself through a couple of dozen aluminum fins to dissipate heat, with some kind of fan or blower system to push or pull cooler air through the heated fins to carry away the heat from the GPU.

The problem with this setup is that if you have a monolithic PCB, you can only really extend the heatsinks and fans off of the PCB to help cool it since a fan blowing air directly into a plastic wall doesn’t do much to help move hot air out of the graphics card.

Nvidia has a genuinely novel innovation on this account, and that’s ditching the monolithic PCB that’s been a mainstay of graphics cards for 30 years. Instead, the RTX 5090 (and presumably subsequent RTX 50-series GPUs to come), splits the PCB into three parts: the video output interface at the ‘front’ of the card facing out from the case, the PCIe interface segment of the card, and the main body of the PCB that houses the GPU itself as well as the VRAM modules and other necessary electronics.

This segmented design allows a gap in the front of the card below the fan, so rather than a fan blowing air into an obstruction, it can fully pass over the fins of the GPU’s heatsink, substantially improving the thermals.

As a result, Nvidia is able to shrink the width of the card down considerably, moving from a 2.4-inch width to a 1.9-inch width, or a roughly 20% reduction on paper. That said, it feels substantially smaller than its predecessor, and it’s definitely a card that won’t completely overwhelm your PC case the way the RTX 4090 does.

That said, the obscene power consumption required by this card means that the 8-pin adapter included in the RTX 5090 package is a comical 4-to-1 dongle that pretty much no PSU in anyone’s PC case can really accommodate.

Most modular PSUs give you three PCIe 8-pin power connectors at most, so let’s just be honest about this setup. You’re going to need to get a new ATX 3.0 PSU with at least 1000W to run this card at a minimum (it’s officially recommended PSU is 950W, but just round up, you’re going to need it), so make sure you factor that into your budget if you pick this card up

Otherwise, the look and feel of the card isn’t that different than previous generations, except the front plate of the GPU where the RTX 5090 branding would have gone is now missing, replaced by a finned shroud to allow air to pass through. The RTX 5090 stamp is instead printed on the center panel, similar to how it was done on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

As a final touch, the white back-lit GeForce RTX logo and the X strips on the front of the card, when powered, add a nice RGB-lite touch that doesn’t look too guady, but for RGB fans out there, you might think it looks rather plain.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Performance

• Most powerful GPU on the consumer market
• Substantially faster than RTX 4090
• Playable 8K gaming

So how does the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 stack up against its predecessor, as well as the best 4K graphics cards on the market more broadly?

Very damn well, it turns out, managing to improve performance over the RTX 4090 in some workloads by 50% or more, while leaving everything else pretty much in the dust.

Though when looked at from 30,000 feet, the overall performance gains are respectable gen-on-gen but aren’t the kind of earth-shattering gains the RTX 4090 made over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090.

Starting with synthetic workloads, the RTX 5090 scores anywhere from 48.6% faster to about 6.7% slower than the RTX 4090 in various 3DMark tests, depending on the workload. The only poor performance for the RTX 5090 was in 3DMark Night Raid, a test where both cards so completely overwhelm the test that the difference here could be down to CPU bottlenecking or other issues that aren’t easily identifiable. On every other 3DMark test, though, the RTX 5090 scores 5.6% better or higher, more often than not by 20-35%. In the most recent;y released test, Steel Nomad, the RTX 5090 is nearly 50% faster than the RTX 4090.

On the compute side of things, the RTX 5090 is up to 34.3% faster in Geekbench 6 OpenGL compute test and 53.9% faster in Vulcan, making it an absolute monster for AI researchers to leverage.

On the creative side, the RTX 5090 is substantially faster in 3D rendering, scoring between 35% and 49.3% faster in my Blender Benchmark 4.30 tests. There’s very little difference between the two cards when it comes to video editing though, as they essentially tie in PugetBench for Creators’ Adobe Premiere test and in Handbrake 1.7 4K to 1080p encoding.

The latter two results might be down to CPU bottlenecking, as even the RTX 4090 pushes right up against the performance ceiling set by the CPU in a lot of cases.

When it comes to gaming, the RTX 5090 is substantially faster than the RTX 4090, especially at 4K. In non-upscaled 1440p gaming, you’re looking at a roughly 18% better average frame rate and a 22.6% better minimum/1% framerate for the RTX 5090. With DLSS 3 upscaling (but no frame generation), you’re looking at 23.3% better average and 23% better minimum/1% framerates overall with the RTX 5090 vs the RTX 4090.

With ray tracing turn on without upscaling, you’re getting 26.3% better average framerates and about 23% better minimum/1% framerates, and with upscaling turned on to balanced (again, no frame generation), you’re looking at about 14% better average fps and about 13% better minimum/1% fps for the RTX 5090 against the RTX 4090.

At 4K, however, the faster memory and wider memory bus really make a difference. Without upscaling and ray tracing turned off, you’re getting upwards of 200 fps at 4K for the RTX 5090 on average, compared to the RTX 4090’s 154 average fps, a nearly 30% increase. The average minimum/1% fps for the RTX 5090 is about 28% faster than the RTX 4090, as well. With DLSS 3 set to balanced, you’re looking at a roughly 22% better average framerate overall compared to the RTX 4090, with an 18% better minimum/1% framerate on average as well.

With ray tracing and no upscaling, the difference is even more pronounced with the RTX 5090 getting just over 34% faster average framerates compared to the RTX 4090 (with a more modest 7% faster average minimum/1% fps). Turn on balanced DLSS 3 with full ray tracing and you’re looking at about 22% faster average fps overall for the RTX 5090, but an incredible 66.2% jump in average minimum/1% fps compared to the RTX 4090 at 4K.

Again, none of this even factors in single frame generation, which can already substantially increase framerates in some games (though with the introduction of some input latency). Once Multi-Frame Generation rolls out at launch, you can expect to see these framerates for the RTX 5090 run substantially higher. Pair that with Nvidia Reflex 2 to help mitigate the input latency issues frame generation can introduce, and the playable performance of the RTX 5090 will only get better with time, and it’s starting from a substantial lead right out of the gate.

In the end, the overall baseline performance of the RTX 5090 comes in about 21% better than the RTX 4090, which is what you’re really looking for when it comes to a gen-on-gen improvement.

That said, you have to ask whether the performance improvement you do get is worth the enormous increase in power consumption. That 575W TDP isn’t a joke. I maxed out at 556W of power at 100% utilization, and I hit 100% fairly often in my testing and while gaming.

The dual flow-through fan design also does a great job of cooling the GPU, but at the expense of turning the card into a space heater. That 575W of heat needs to go somewhere, and that somewhere is inside your PC case. Make sure you have adequate airflow to vent all that hot air, otherwise everything in your case is going to slowly cook.

As far as performance-per-price, this card does slightly better than the RTX 4090 on value for the money, but that’s never been a buying factor for this kind of card anyway. You want this card for its performance, plain and simple, and in that regard, it’s the best there is.

Should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090?

Buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 if…

Don’t buy it if…

Also consider

How I tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

• I spent about a week and a half with the RTX 5090
• I used my complete GPU testing suite to analyze the card’s performance
• I tested the card in everyday, gaming, creative, and AI workload usage

I spent about a week and a half testing the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, both running synthetic tests as well as using it in my day-to-day PC for both work and gaming.

I used my updated testing suite, which uses industry standard benchmark tools like 3DMark, Geekbench, Pugetbench for Creators, and various built-in gaming benchmarks. I used the same testbench setup listed to the right for the purposes of testing this card, as well as all of the other cards I tested for comparison purposes.

I’ve tested and retested dozens of graphics cards for the 20+ graphics card reviews I’ve written for TechRadar over the last few years, and so I know the ins and outs of these PC components. That’s why you can trust my review process to help you make the right buying decision for your next GPU, whether it’s the RTX 5090 or any of the other graphics cards I review.

• Originally reviewed January 2024