We’ve tried to strike a balance between games with ray-tracing effects and games without it, though most AAA games these days include it, and modern GPUs should be able to handle it well (best of luck to AMD with its upcoming RDNA 4 cards).
For the 5090, we’ve run all tests in 4K—if you don’t care about running games in 4K, even if you want super-high frame rates at 1440p or for some kind of ultrawide monitor, the 5090 is probably overkill. When we run upscaling tests, we use the newest DLSS version available for Nvidia cards, the newest FSR version available for AMD cards, and the newest XeSS version available for Intel cards (not relevant here, just stating for the record), and we use the “Quality” setting (at 4K, that equates to an actual rendering version of 1440p).
Rendering performance: A lot faster, a lot more power-hungry
Before we talk about Frame Generation or “fake frames,” let’s compare apples to apples and just examine the 5090’s rendering performance.
The card mainly 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 move from a 384-bit memory bus to a 512-bit bus. It also jumps from 24GB of RAM to 32GB, but games generally aren’t butting up against a 24GB limit yet, so the capacity increase by itself shouldn’t really change performance if all you’re focused on is gaming.
And for people who prioritize performance over all else, the 5090 is a big deal—it’s the first consumer graphics card from any company that is faster than a 4090, as Nvidia never spruced up the 4090 last year when it did its mid-generation Super refreshes of the 4080, 4070 Ti, and 4070.
Comparing natively rendered games at 4K, the 5090 is between 17 percent and 40 percent faster than the 4090, with most of the games we tested landing somewhere in the low to high 30 percent range. That’s an undeniably big bump, one that’s roughly commensurate with the increase in the number of CUDA cores. Tests run with DLSS enabled (both upscaling-only and with Frame Generation running in 2x mode) improve by roughly the same amount.
