Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review: more graphics card power in a smaller GPU
Maximum frame rate
🏆 Review score: 4.5 out of 5
🏅Editor’s Choice
The Nvidia Geforce RTX 5090 isn’t the Jesus messiah savior of graphics cards, but it is a very impressive graphics card all around. Nvidia has managed to pack in more graphical power than ever into a smaller GPU. I love the new dual-slot, double flow-through design of the card. It’s a marvel of industrial to look at and hold, and it’s the closest thing to art I’ve seen from computer components.
Nvidia’s new flagship RTX 50-series GPU can deliver 4K 60fps or higher gaming with full ray-tracing without any supporting AI-based DLSS or frame generation. With DLSS 4 and its new multi-frame generation technology, the RTX 5090 makes 200 to 300 – and even 400 fps 4K gaming a regular affair. Some may argue those frames aren’t real and don’t count, but DLSS and AI-enhanced frame rates are becoming more necessary everyday with higher frame rate and resolution displays.
The greater AI focus Nvidia is putting into its graphics cards is also just the first step to a total revolution in how computer graphics are rendered. DLSS and AI has always been a value add for Nvidia’s graphics cards, but now its a headlining feature for the RTX 5090, that also helps futureproof it while making it potentially the first GPU to support 8K 120fps displays.
Pros:
✅👯♂️ Multi-frame generation is a true revelation that makes 200, 300, and even 400 fps gaming possible at 4K
✅ ⚡️ Finally a graphics card fast enough for 4K 240fps and possibly 8K 120fps displays
✅ 📐 New DLSS 4 transformer model improves lighting, scaling, and motion
✅ 🤏 Smaller, two-slot design makes this GPU a better fit for more PC builds
Cons
❌🪭 Double flow-through design doesn’t work for vertical GPUs or dual-chamber cases
❌🤑 $2,000 price tag will be a steep investment for most people
❌👾 Multi-frame generation can introduce large blotches of artifacts
🤏 Smaller two-slot card. The Nvidia RTX 5090 is finally back to being a dual-slot-sized graphics card. That should make Nvidia’s flagship GPU a better fit for Mini-ITX and SFF builds since the xx90 cards ballooned to a triple-slot size with the RTX 3090. It’s also an amazing feat that Nvidia has managed to pack the RTX 5090’s greater number of transistors into a smaller card and PCB.
💨 Double flow-through design. As I just mentioned, the Nvidia RTX 5090’s overall PCB is even smaller now, so almost the whole card is fully see-through. Shinning a light through the card reveals both fans can freely push air through a series of heat pipes and the radiator grills. Comparatively, the last RTX 4090 Founders Edition only had a flow-through heatsink on the front half of it. It’s an effective cooler design that kept temps between 70-81°F on full load. Even though it ran hotter than the RTX 4090, that’s to be expected when the TGP goes from 450W to 575W. and I saw it maintained 5-8 lower temperatures than the RTX 4090 while emitting less of a whine when the fans went full speed.
🪭 Watch your airflow. Now, this new double flow-through cooler does remove the usual back exhaust port seen on virtually every other GPU. Since this graphics card only pushes up and through the fins, it works well if there’s an exhaust fan directly above it. However, this cooler design won’t work well if you have it vertically oriented, as it will just blow hot air onto your motherboard. It also might not work well in dual-chamber setups or most SFF cases, as the exhaust will just hit the separator or other components positioned right behind the GPU.
📋 Core specs. The Nvidia RTX 5090 features 92 billion transistors with 21,760 CUDA Cores. Beyond that, Blackwell brings bigger architectural improvements, including 5th Generation Tensor cores, 4th Generation Ray Tracing cores, and 32GB of GDDR7 video memory. Nvidia touts that the RTX 5090 delivers almost three times the AI Tops of 3,352 than the RTX 4090’s 1,321 AI Tops. That largely plays into Nvidia’s latest AI supersampling and frame generation technology, DLSS 4, which promises to help the RTX 5090 outperform the RTX 4090 by two times.
📊 Down to the numbers. The Nvidia RTX 5090 is a higher-performance graphics card than the RTX 4090. There’s no doubt about it from the benchmark numbers I recorded. It’s not quite two times more when looking at the natively rendered frame rates or even with DLSS factored in. The real game changer is DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation that lets you play games at 4K maxed out with all the ray tracing at 200, 300, and even up to 400 frames per second.
👯♂️ DLSS 4 multi-frame gen. The biggest changes the RTX 5090 and Blackwell architecture introduces is multi-frame generation to boost frame rates by up to four times. Frame generation first debuted in DLSS 3.0 on RTX 40-series cards, allowing Nivida’s GPU to create a virtual frame for every real frame rendered. DLSS 4 takes frame generation to the next level, producing two to three virtual frames for every real one.
🤖 Necessary AI enhancement. DLSS 4 multi-frame gen allows 4K games like Cyberpunk 2077, which normally run on the RTX 5090 at 57 fps without any DLSS, to suddenly shoot up to 243 fps. That’s a lot of frames, but it feels almost necessary for performance-punishing games like Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2. Black Myth 2 struggled to run at a solid 60 fps at 4K with very high ray tracing and high settings, but then we saw it running at almost 250 fps with DLSS 4. Nvidia’s latest multi-frame generation technology comes at the right time when 4K 240fps gaming monitors become more readily available. Plus, the addition of DisplayPort 2.1 on the back of the RTX 5090, means these cards will be able to support up to 8K 120fps displays in the future.
🪄 Works like magic. Amazingly, it’s impossible to distinguish between a real frame and a virtual one, even with DLSS 4 turned up to max. DLSS frame generation does add a few more milliseconds of latency, but it only peaked at 20-45ms in games like Marvel Rivals and Hogwarts Legacy. One. Jumping to higher levels of frame generation doesn’t increase latency either. I was only able to enjoy multi-frame gen in a few games ahead of RTX 50-series launch, but Nvidia has promised 75 games will support DLSS 4 (including God of War Ragnarök and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) on January 30.
💔 Frame tearing. The only unfortunate thing about DLSS 4 multi-frame gen is it can sometimes create unsightly frame tearing. I call it frame tearing because it looks like large blocks of frames are popping out in large rectangular artifacts. It rarely occurred during my testing and only when I quickly whipped the camera from looking at an intricate texture (like a mountain or a bookshelf) to a completely other uniform texture (like a blue sky). I also only saw it occur in Hogwarts Legacy, which leads me to believe you may encounter it in open-world games like Dragon’s Dogma or Elden Ring. Hopefully, this is just a minor bug that Nvidia can fix in the near future.
🛠️ Another DLSS 4 upgrade. Aside from multi-frame generation, DLSS 4 is also giving plain-old AI super sampling, ray reconstruction, and deep-learning anti-aliasing a shot in the arm. DLSS 4 introduces a new transformer model that basically looks at more of the overall image to improve detail, lighting, and motion. During my review, I was able to test this out with CyberPunk 2077, and I saw improvements in ray-traced sun streaks. I could also see smoother motion in Alan Wake II.
📈 About that higher price. There’s no beating around the bush about it: the $2000 RTX 5090 is a more expensive card than the $1,600 RTX 4090 it’s replacing. That’s in contrast to how Nvidia actually drove down the prices of the rest of its 50-series cards, including the $549 Nvidia RTX 5070. The performance gulf between the Nvidia RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 has never been wider – on paper, at least. Within a week I’ll be able to show you whether it’s worth spending all the extra money for Nvidia’s top-tier graphics card.
📅 When can I buy it? The Nvidia RTX 5090 (and RTX 5080) will launch soon on January 30. Preorders haven’t opened or been announced yet, but hopefully, that will change in just a few days.
Should you buy the Nvidia Geforce RTX 5090?
Yes, if…
✅ 📺 You own a high-frame-rate gaming monitor or TV
✅ 🏃♂️ You want the a faster 4K gaming experience
✅ 🗜️ You’re itching to build a smaller, more powerful gaming PC
No, if…
❌ 👀 You’re taken out of your gaming immersion at the slightest visual artifacts
❌ 💸 You’re not ready to drop $2K on one PC part (get the Nvidia RTX 5080 instead)
❌ 🖥️ You prefer to build small mini-itx systems
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.