The times they are a changing. With Moore’s Law in tatters, even Nvidia has had to admit that it can’t go on cranking out colossally more powerful gaming GPUs in every generation when the transistors haven’t become any smaller. Just as CPUs now only offer an incremental speed bump every couple of years, GPUs are going the same way in terms of raw processing power. The answer to this conundrum, according to Nvidia, is to harness the power of AI to give your gaming frame rate a helping hand, but is it enough? We put the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 through its paces to find out.
We’ll cut straight to the chase on one point, which is that, whatever your views on AI, the RTX 5090 still remains the best graphics card you can buy right now in terms of performance. The RTX 4090 has been phased out, AMD has no competition in this league, and the RTX 5090 is also more powerful than the RTX 4090 in every respect anyway. In some cases the differences are disappointing when you consider that the new Nvidia flagship’s MSRP is $400 more than the RTX 4090, but Nvidia has some tricks up its sleeve in other games.
The biggest one is DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which was only available to test in a handful of games at the time of writing, but which we’ll continue to test in our benchmarks as more games start to support it. Put simply, while the RTX 4090 could generate one extra frame for each one rendered by the GPU, the RTX 5090 can generate two or even three frames. The result is transformative, as you’ll see in our results, but first let’s take a step back and look at what’s in the new GPU.
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