NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition Video Card Review

Conclusion

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is the current flagship video card under NVIDIA’s new RTX 50 series family lineup. This $1,999 video card is based on NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture and packs a ton of CUDA cores, RT cores, Tensor cores, and 32GB of GDDR7 with massive bandwidth into a slim 2-slot package in the Founders Edition. The Founders Edition design is truly impressive, with a very smart, clever, and well-engineered design and form.

In today’s review, we took a look at performance with raster, Ray Tracing, DLSS Upscaling, Frame Gen, Multi Framegen, Latency, FPS, and all of it. We pushed the card at 4K and tested some very new games as well. We introduced some PC Latency testing, to see how Frame Gen is affected, and how well Frame Gen and Multi Framegen truly performs in terms of latency. It’s just a preview, of course, Multi Framegen was only tested here in one game, Alan Wake 2. There will be more games coming with DLSS 4 support, and over time we’ll be able to spend more time testing more of those games, but so far the results are interesting.

Performance

Raster

Let’s start with pure native resolution and rasterized performance. We tested all of the games at 4K, and the highest in-game settings. Most of the games were very playable at the highest in-game settings at 4K, without the need for Upscaling. However, there are certainly some demanding games that may not have performed as great as hoped or desired. In Alan Wake 2 the RTX 5090 had about a 28% performance improvement over the RTX 4090. In Black Myth: Wukong the RTX 5090 was 33% faster than the GeForce RTX 4090. However, it still wasn’t enough to provide 60FPS in this game at 4K “Cinematic” quality setting, you will need Upscaling in this game for a better experience at 4K.

In Cyberpunk 2077 the RTX 5090 was 48% faster than the GeForce RTX 4090, which did appear to be an outlier in our testing, it was the only situation where it was that high. In Dying Light 2 the RTX 5090 was 36% faster than the RTX 4090. In F1 24 the RTX 5090 was only 19% faster than the RTX 4090, so this was on the lower side. It could be a CPU bottleneck, at least it’s a possibility that the CPU is holding it back in this game. In Horizon Forbidden West the RTX 5090 was 22% faster than the RTX 4090. Again, this game could have a CPU bottleneck that is holding the RTX 5090 back a bit, because these are lower-than-expected numbers.

In Indiana Jones, the RTX 5090 was 19% faster than the RTX 4090. Even though we had this game at the “Supreme” quality setting, this is a bit of a lower-than-expected performance number as well in this game. It could be another case of the CPU holding it back, as a possibility. In Stalker 2 the RTX 5090 was 20% faster than the RTX 4090. We know that Stalker 2 is quite CPU-bound, so this could be another case of that happening. Regardless, that’s more than a few games there where the performance difference is a bit below expectations.

Ray Tracing

We enabled Ray Tracing at 4K and 1440p, as there were a lot of situations where Ray Tracing at 4K was simply too demanding and required us to drop resolution or enable Upscaling to be playable. In Alan Wake 2, at 4K with Ray Tracing the RTX 5090 was not playable without Upscaling. However, at 1440p with the new “Ultra” Ray Tracing option this game was playable at native resolution. At 4K, you’ll want to enable DLSS Upscaling, and the game is more than enjoyable at the new “Ultra” RT setting, which is very demanding in this game.

In Black Myth: Wukong Ray Tracing at 4K is definitely not playable, and even with Upscaling, it’s borderline playable in this game. To be honest, we think you’d have to use a more aggressive Upscaling mode like Balanced quality to make this game playable at 4K with Ray Tracing or lower the RT setting. At any rate, the RTX 5090 is 41% faster than the RTX 4090 with RT at 4K in this game. At 1440p, this game is on the border of being playable without Upscaling, but really I think you’d still want to utilize Quality Upscaling at 1440p for the best experience. At 1440p the RTX 5090 is 34% faster than the RTX 4090.

In Cyberpunk 2077 turning on regular Ray Tracing at 4K is still demanding, we do just hit 60FPS average, barely, but you may still want to enable DLSS Upscaling for a smooth gameplay experience. The RTX 5090 is 33% faster than the RTX 4090 with RT at 4K. We also tried Ray Tracing Overdrive (Path Tracing) at 4K, and it was not playable at all without Upscaling, performance was near 30FPS. With Upscaling, it was playable just above 60FPS average. The RTX 5090 was 38% faster than the RTX 4090. However, at 1440p it does appear Ray Tracing Overdrive (Path Tracing) is playable well over 60FPS without Upscaling. The RTX 5090 is 33% faster than the RTX 4090.

In Dying Light 2 the RTX 5090 was playable at 4K with Ray Tracing. The RTX 5090 is 37% faster than the RTX 4090. In F1 24 the RTX 5090 is playable at 4K with Ray Tracing. The RTX 5090 is 29% faster than the RTX 4090. Lastly, in Indiana Jones, we can enable Full RT Path Tracing, and amazingly the game is actually playable at 60FPS at 4K without Upscaling. You can enable Upscaling for an even smoother experience, but it’s certainly very enjoyable. The RTX 5090 is 30% faster than the RTX 4090.

DLSS/Upscaling/Frame Gen

It is clear that DLSS Upscaling is still a big helper for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 in allowing a playable experience in games with very demanding settings, like Ray Tracing. The beauty, and benefit of DLSS Upscaling is that it also improves responsiveness and input, as well as frames per second. We were able to utilize DLSS 4 Upscaling in Alan Wake 2, and it looked and performed great, really allowing a smooth experience. Overall, DLSS Upscaling is kind of needed in some newer games, and especially with Ray Tracing enabled at 4K, it’s kind of required it feels like, even with the GeForce RTX 5090.

Frame Generation is a tricky one, and is very subjective in terms of how it feels, what it adds to the experience, and how it responds and plays per game. Frame Generation inherently does not render its frames through the game engine pipeline, but rather outside of it, generated without any game input or response. Therefore, it has a different feeling, it can be akin to a smoothing technology, or even an advanced motion blur, as it provides more fluidity, but not performance in the traditional sense.

In our testing today, we added in some PC Latency testing, thanks to NVIDIA FrameView. We found, naturally, that turning on DLSS Upscaling improves latency, both the average and maximum latency, it is reduced. This is because it is still using game-rendered frames, and just upscaling from a lower internal resolution, it has game input calculated and is akin to just lowering the resolution. It naturally improves latency, responsiveness, and frames per second, both. Therefore Upscaling provides the best experience improvement.

When we looked at Frame Generation, specifically the new Multi Framegen, we found that latency did increase from that Upscaling latency. It added latency as each multiple of Frame Gen was added. The average increased, and more importantly, the maximum latency increased. We saw the highest latency at 3X and 4X Multi Framegen, and sometimes it was worse than not having anything enabled. At the very least, Frame Gen has always had more added latency than just Upscaling, and simply does not match the excellent latency of Upscaling, and never can, simply due to the nature of how it works.

It’s hard for us to tell you how it feels, because that is going to be different for everyone, and each game is also going to feel different. Overall, from my personal experience, I do not see the advantage past 2X Frame Gen, there’s too much potential for errors, like ghosting or other weird phenomena making the game look bad.

Overall, I think the best performant option is simply DLSS Upscaling. DLSS Upscaling provides the best gameplay experience and much lower latency than native resolution. Frame Gen adds frames, but also adds latency, and there just doesn’t seem to be a need for it when you can just enable Upscaling for more performance, or lower game settings if a game doesn’t perform well. There are other options I’d check off the list first to make a game run faster before I would ever turn on Frame Generation. This is a personal opinion, yours may vary, and that is why this option will always be subjective.

Final Points

There is a lot to unpack in regards to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, and GeForce RTX 50 series from NVIDIA. A lot of technologies have been debuted, and there are a lot of features to test that we simply cannot do in one single review. In today’s review, we focused on the gameplay performance aspect of the GeForce RTX 5090.

We focused on the GeForce RTX 5090 performance, so subsequent reviews will focus on the rest of the family, and we’ll have to see how they fit into the overall opinion of the RTX 50 series family this generation. For now, we can look at the GeForce RTX 5090 as the flagship of the RTX 50 series, and what it offers for the gameplay experience at a steep price of $1,999, a 25% price bump over the previous generation GeForce RTX 4090.

If we look back at the average performance gains we saw in just regular raster performance, we experienced performance that ranged from 19%-48%, but there were a lot of common performance gains in the 30-33% range. We did have some outliers that were lower, and some higher, depending on the game and settings. We generally saw gains in the 30% region with Ray Tracing enabled, where scenarios were more GPU-bound.

We think one problem that is being encountered is that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is becoming CPU-bound in a lot of games. The data tells us that perhaps even our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is holding back the potential of the GeForce RTX 5090. Therefore, as newer, faster CPU generations are released, the GeForce RTX 5090’s performance advantage may increase over time. The GeForce RTX 5090 has powerful specifications, but the performance advantage we are currently seeing seems shy of what should be expected with those specifications. It may very well be the case that it is being held back, and it has more potential with better-optimized games or faster CPUs. Time will tell on that one.

As it stands right now, you should always buy based on the current level of performance, not what might happen. Therefore, at this time you are seeing about a 33% gameplay performance advantage average, but with a 25% price increase, making the price-to-performance value very narrow. The facts are, that the GeForce RTX 5090 has no competition, it does offer the best gameplay performance you can get on the desktop.

It is NVIDIA’s latest flagship, and flagship it is, offering gobs of memory, tons of bandwidth, and a great potential for machine learning applications. Even though it has that machine learning prowess, again it does bring the best game performance you can buy right now, but you are really going to be paying a lot for it this generation, in terms of price, and power. Yeah, the GeForce RTX 5090 is a power-hungry video card, it demands a beefy PSU, so don’t skimp on that if you are going this route.

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