We’ve tried to strike a balance between games with ray tracing effects and games without them, although most AAA games these days include it, and modern GPUs should be able to handle it just fine (best of luck to AMD with their upcoming RDNA 4). cards).
For the 5090, we ran all tests in 4K; If you don’t mind running games in 4K, even if you want super high frame rates at 1440p or some kind of ultrawide monitor, the 5090 is probably overkill. When we run upscaling tests, we use the latest DLSS version available for Nvidia cards, the latest FSR version available for AMD cards, and the latest XeSS version available for Intel cards (not relevant here, just noted for the record), and we used the “Quality” setting (at 4K, which is equivalent to a true 1440p rendered version).
Rendering performance: much faster and consumes much more power
Before we talk about frame generation or “false frames”, let’s compare apples to apples and simply examine the 5090’s rendering performance.
The card primarily benefits from four things compared to the 4090: the updated Blackwell GPU architecture, a nearly 33 percent increase in the number of CUDA cores, an upgrade from GDDR6X to GDDR7, and a switch from a memory bus of 384 bits to one of 512. -bit bus. It also jumps from 24GB of RAM to 32GB, but games still generally don’t hit the 24GB limit, so the capacity increase alone shouldn’t change performance if all you’re focused on is gaming.
And for people who prioritize performance above all else, the 5090 is a big deal: It’s the first consumer graphics card from any company that’s faster than a 4090, since Nvidia never improved on the 4090 last year when it made its mid-generation Super. 4080, 4070 Ti and 4070 upgrades.
Comparing games rendered natively at 4K, the 5090 is between 17 and 40 percent faster than the 4090, with most games we tested falling somewhere in the low to high 30 percent range. Without a doubt, this is a large increase, which is more or less proportional to the increase in the number of CUDA cores. Tests run with DLSS enabled (both upscaling and Frame Generation running in 2x mode) improve by approximately the same amount.