Reviews of the RTX 5090 have been released, and for those who seek top-tier performance without worrying about price or energy use, Nvidia has truly outdone itself with the RTX 5090. This graphics card excels in both rasterization and ray tracing, offering unmatched capabilities at 4K resolution. With the addition of DLSS 4, this GPU can achieve over 200 FPS in 4K gaming for titles that utilize Nvidia’s Multi-Frame Generation technology.
Performance Comparison
However, the RTX 5090 does not represent as significant an improvement over the RTX 4090 as the RTX 4090 did compared to the RTX 3090. In our evaluations, the new GPU shows an average performance increase of 27% over the RTX 4090. It’s important to note that this performance boost comes with a hefty rise in power usage; the RTX 5090 has a power rating of 575 W, compared to the RTX 4090’s 450 W.
Power Normalization Insights
This raises an intriguing question: How does the performance of the RTX 5090 stack up against the RTX 4090 when both cards are adjusted for power consumption? Luckily, ComputerBase has conducted tests, and the findings are quite enlightening.
Their research indicates that the RTX 5090 achieves an average of 17% more FPS compared to the RTX 4090 in rasterization tasks when both GPUs are limited to 450 W. This means that when the RTX 5090 is restricted to using 125 W less power, it experiences an 8% decline in performance.
CUDA Cores and Performance
The 17% increase in performance at 450 W is particularly noteworthy, especially since the RTX 5090 contains 33% more CUDA cores than the RTX 4090. One might expect a more significant performance disparity than the observed 17% when the power advantage of the RTX 5090 is negated. That said, the slightly lower clock speeds of the RTX 5090 (113 MHz less) likely play a role in limiting its overall performance.
In conclusion, it appears that Nvidia is relying on sheer power to maintain a competitive edge for the RTX 5090 over the RTX 4090. However, this approach may not bode well for the efficiency of the GPU, as the RTX 5090’s performance scales linearly with thermal design power (TDP)—showing a 27% performance increase for a 28% increase in energy consumption. For context, the RTX 4090 boasts over a 50% performance lead compared to the RTX 3090, with only a 29% higher TDP.
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