It's been two years since NVIDIA introduced its Ada Lovelace GPUs, kicking things off with the RTX 4090 and finishing up the initial lineup with the SUPER family At CES, the company unveiled its new RTX 50 "Blackwell" family which features a brand new architecture and several changes such as new cores, AI accelerators, new memory standards, and the latest video/display capabilities. Today, NVIDIA is releasing the last and fastest card within its "RTX 50" portfolio, the GeForce RTX 5090. The GeForce RTX 5090 is a top-of-the-line graphics card, designed for enthusiast gamers and prosumers, and features a gargantuan price […]
La nouvelle génération de cartes graphiques Nvidia est enfin là et comme à son habitude, le constructeur démarre par le haut du panier avec le lancement simultané des GeForce RTX 5080 et RTX 5090 dès le 30 janvier prochain.
After more than two years, NVIDIA's new flagship is here. Now, this might seem like a silly question, but did NVIDIA really need to release the GeForce RTX 5090 now? Consider that…
Announced back at CES 2025, Nvidia's RTX 50-series is here, built on the latest Blackwell architecture. First up for review is the new flagship, the RTX 5090, which hits the market at an eye-watering £1939/$1999. Packing in a total of 92.2 billion transistors, 21760 CUDA Cores and 32GB of GDDR7 memory, Nvidia claims that the RTX 5090 is ‘up to 2x' faster than the out-going RTX 4090, but is that really the case? And what's power consumption like given the rated 575W TGP? All that and more is covered in today's review…
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:49 RTX 5090 recap, pricing + specs
02:50 Test setup
04:31 Alan Wake 2
05:11 Black Myth: Wukong
05:47 Cyberpunk 2077
06:17 Final Fantasy XVI
06:42 Forza Horizon 5
07:11 Ghost of Tsushima
07:38 Horizon Forbidden West
08:05 The Last of Us Part 1
08:30 Plague Tale: Requiem
08:53 Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
09:22 Starfield
09:50 Total War: Warhammer III
10:37 12-game average results
11:41 Cost per frame analysis
12:47 RT Alan Wake II
13:19 RT Black Myth: Wukong
13:47 RT Cyberpunk 2077
14:14 RT F1 24
14:45 RT Ratchet & Clank
15:07 RT Returnal
15:34 RT Shadow of the Tomb Raider
16:07 RT Star Wars Outlaws
16:33 RT 8-game average
17:31 DLSS 4 – new Transformer model
19:59 DLSS 4 – Multi Frame Generation
27:09 AI & productivity benchmarks
28:33 Closer look at the Founders Edition
29:44 Thermals & acoustics (with soundest)
31:31 Power draw and efficiency
33:33 Closing thoughts
If you missed the announcement earlier in the month, the Nvidia RTX 5090 is arriving as the first of four 50-series GPUs. The RTX 5080 is the next cab off the rank, launching on January 30th, while the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti are set to arrive some time next month. This review is firmly focused on the flagship SKU, though, and there is plenty to cover. We look at raster performance, ray tracing, new upgrades made to DLSS 4, alongside AI benchmarks, power, efficiency and more.
RTX 5090
RTX 4090
RTX 4080 Super
RTX 4080
RTX 4070 Ti Super
Process
TSMC N4
TSMC N4
TSMC N4
TSMC N4
TSMC N4
SMs
170
128
80
76
66
CUDA Cores
21760
16384
10240
9728
8448
Tensor Cores
680
512
320
304
264
RT Cores
170
128
80
76
66
Texture Units
680
512
320
304
264
ROPs
176
176
112
112
96
GPU Boost Clock
2407 MHz
2520 MHz
2550 MHz
2505 MHz
2610 MHz
Memory Data Rate
28 Gbps
21 Gbps
23 Gbps
22.4 Gbps
21 Gbps
L2 Cache
98304 KB
73729 KB
65536 KB
65536 KB
49152 KB
Total Video Memory
32GB GDDR7
24GB GDDR6X
16GB GDDR6X
16GB GDDR6X
16GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface
512-bit
384-bit
256-bit
256-bit
256-bit
Memory Bandwidth
1792 GB/Sec
1008 GB/Sec
736 GB/Sec
716.8 GB/Sec
672 GB/Sec
TGP
575W
450W
320W
320W
285W
First, a quick spec recap. The RTX 5090 is built on the new GB202 die, measuring 750mm2, though it's not quite a full implementation of the silicon. Instead we find a total of 11 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), each holding up to eight Texture Processing Clusters (TPC), for a total of 85. Each TPC is home to two Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), giving us 170, and each SM still holds 256 CUDA Cores, meaning the RTX 5090 has an eye-watering total of 21760 shaders. We also find 170 RT cores, 680 Tensor cores, 680 Texture Units, and 176 ROPs.
This time around, however, there's no node-shrink, and GB202 remains fabricated on TSMC's N4 node, as per the RTX 40-series. As such, rated clock speed is not increased this generation and is actually touted slightly below that of the RTX 4090, with the RTX 5090 delivering a rated 2407MHz boost clock, compared to its predecessor's 2520MHz boost.
The memory configuration has seen significant upgrades, though.The RTX 5090 now comes equipped with a super-wide 512-bit memory interface, paired with 32GB GDDR7 memory running at 28Gbps, and that puts total memory bandwidth at a staggering 1792 GB/s. L2 cache is also increased to 98MB, up from the 74MB of the RTX 4090.
Considering the large increases to die size and core count, but with no node shrink, it's perhaps unsurprising to see power draw has increased, this time boasting a 575W TGP. This is something we focus on closely in this review, using our enhanced GPU power testing methodology, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.
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