Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review: the new fastest gaming GPUThe Founders Edition delivers exceptional performance in an impossibly small form factor.Image credit: Nvidia/Digital Foundry Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry Additional contributions byWill JuddPublished on Jan. 23, 2025 Page 1 of 8 Next page Nvidia's RTX 50-series "Blackwell" graphics cards arrive with this, the RTX 5090. At $2000/1940, this is an extremely expensive proposition, but it makes some alluring promises in return: best-ever gaming performance from the GB202 GPU, 32GB of high-speed GDDR7 memory for games or content creation, and DLSS 4 with multi frame generation to max out almost any monitor's maximum refresh rate in supported games. Does it deliver? To find out, we've tested the RTX 5090 Founders Edition in our new suite of challenging titles, looking at RT and raster performance across a range of resolutions and in some of the most demanding scenes we've identified from our tech reviews of PC games, many with custom benchmark runs exclusive to Digital Foundry. Before we get into the benchmark results, let's cover off the physical design of the card itself, our performance expectations based on its specs and how we'll be testing it. Here's the video review of the RTX 5090. Watch on YouTubeIt's immediately apparent that this Nvidia Founders Edition model is by far the most compact flagship card we've seen from Team Green in years, with a two-slot design that actually fits into small form factor PCs despite drawing a rated 575W. That magic trick is achieved through a centralised PCB and two flow-through fans, which draw air straight through two impressively dense fin stacks and out the other side. It's an astonishing piece of industrial design. Third-party cards from Nvidia's partners are expected to tread more familiar ground, with the more customary triple-fan, triple-fan designs, so the Founders Edition model could be even harder to find than usual. (We've rounded up the UK and US RTX 5090 retailers with listings for bookmarking purposes if needed.) Either way, you can expect hefty power delivery, with the FE card requiring a 600W 12V-2x6 power cable, which can be attached directly from compatible ATX 3.0+ PSUs or connected to four 8-pin PCIe cables using the adapter provided. This is angled on the FE card, to prevent undue strain on the cable, while the revised connector ought to prevent the charring we experienced on one RTX 4090 FE unit. As well as the usual HDMI 2.1 port, there are three DisplayPort 2.1 ports, allowing for compatible 4K 240Hz HDR displays to be connected without the need for DSC (display stream compression). NvidiaRTX 5090RTX 5080RTX 5070 TiRTX 5070GPUGB202GB203GB203GB205Cores217601075289606144Boost clock2.41GHz2.62GHz2.45GHz2.51GHzTensor core TOPS335218011406988RT core TFLOPS31817113394Memory32GB GDDR716GB GDDR716GB GDDR712GB GDDR7Memory bus width512-bit256-bit256-bit192-bitMemory bandwidth1792GB/s960GB/s896GB/s672GB/sTotal Graphics Power575W360W300W250WPSU recommendation1000W850W750W650WPower connector600W PCIe 5.0 (4x 8-pin)450W PCIe 5.0 (3x 8-pin)300W PCIe 5.0 (2x 8-pin)300W PCIe 5.0 (2x 8-pin)Price$1999/1939$999/979$749/729$549/539Release DateJanuary 30thJanuary 30thFebruaryFebruaryIn terms of specs, we're looking at 21,760 CUDA cores, rated boost clocks of 2.41GHz and 1792GB/s of memory bandwidth, with that 32GB of GDDR7 attached via a super-wide 512-bit bus. That translates into fairly substantial gains versus the RTX 4090 FE, which has "only" 16,384 CUDA cores and a 384-bit memory interface good for 1018GB/s of bandwidth, though that card did run at even higher boost clocks of 2.52GHz. That means a 33 percent increase in GPU cores, a 77 improvement in memory bandwidth and a 28 percent increase in power consumption. Most of Nvidia's marketing materials regarding the 5090 versus the 4090 have focused on comparisons with multi frame generation versus single frame generation, so it'll be fascinating to see how the two flagship cards card in true apples-to-apples tests. We'd expect something in the range of 25 to 35 percent should be possible, looking at the spec differences, but there are plenty of complications that could shift the results one way or another. For all of our results, we're using a top-end system based around the fastest gaming CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, to shift the burden to the graphics card as much as possible. We also have 32GB of Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, a high-end Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard and a 1000W Corsair PSU. With all that said, let's get into the benchmarks. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 AnalysisTo see this content please enable targeting cookies. Page 1 of 8 Next page