Nvidia RTX 5090 Review: Ray Tracing, DLSS 4, and Raw Power

1. Introduction2. Meet the RTX 5090 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. Alan Wake II5. Black Myth: Wukong6. Cyberpunk 20777. Final Fantasy XVI8. Forza Horizon 59. Ghost of Tsushima10. Horizon Forbidden West11. The Last of Us Part 112. A Plague Tale: Requiem13. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 214. Starfield15. Total War: Warhammer III16. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)17. Cost Per Frame Analysis18. Ray Tracing: Alan Wake II19. Ray Tracing: Black Myth: Wukong20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: F1 2422. Ray Tracing: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart23. Ray Tracing: Returnal24. Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider25. Ray Tracing: Star Wars Outlaws26. Ray Tracing Performance Summary27. DLSS 4 Testing28. AI & Productivity Benchmarks29. Clock Speed30. GPU Temperatures31. Acoustics32. Power Draw: 1080p33. Power Draw: 1440p34. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)35. Performance per Watt: 1080p36. Performance per Watt: 1440p37. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)38. Total System Power Draw39. Closing Thoughts40. View All Pages

Here we present a range of AI and productivity benchmarks, designed to offer insight into the sort of workloads that might be undertaken by someone purchasing this calibre of GPU.

Starting with our Stable Diffusion XL FP16 image generation test, as expected the RTX 5090 is decently faster than the RTX 4090, to the tune of 33%, which scales in-line with our game testing.

We also run the AI Text Generation benchmark designed to measure LLM performance, with four AI models we can test in Procyon. Gains over the 4090 varies slightly depending on the model, but Llama 2 performance has improved by 37% to pick out one example.

I also include the Geekbench AI Pro benchmark. The Half Precision metric shows the largest gains for the 5090, with a 25% increase, though the other two categories show improvements of less than 20% over the 4090.

Blender benchmark makes a return, measuring the performance of the Classroom render scene. This shows a 31% gain over the 4090.

Finally, we run the V-Ray GPU benchmark, using the RTX path. This shows another 36% gain for the 5090 over its predecessor.

Become a Patron!