The Nvidia RTX 50 “Blackwell” series graphics cards have arrived, with the RTX 5090 leading the pack at a price of $2000/£1940. This high-priced option promises the best gaming performance ever seen in the GPU GB202, 32GB of high-speed GDDR7 memory, and DLSS 4 for maximizing refresh rates on supported game monitors.
Testing the RTX 5090 Founders Edition involved analyzing performance in challenging titles, focusing on RT and rasterization performance across various resolutions. The compact design of the Founders Edition model stands out among high-end cards, featuring a two-slot design that fits well in small form factor PCs despite consuming 575W.
In terms of specifications, the RTX 5090 offers 21,760 CUDA cores, boost clocks of 2.41GHz, and 1792GB/s memory bandwidth with 32GB of GDDR7. Compared to the RTX 4090 FE, there is a 33% increase in GPU cores, 77% improvement in memory bandwidth, and a 28% increase in power consumption.
Nvidia’s marketing materials for the 5090 and 4090 focus on single-frame vs. multi-frame generation comparisons. Test results will show how the flagship cards perform in comparison tests, with expectations of a 25-35% difference due to specification variations. A high-end system with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, 32GB of Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, and a 1000W Corsair power supply was used for all testing.
With these details in mind, let’s move on to the benchmark tests.
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