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The Nvidia RTX 5090 has been unveiled and gamers can now pre-order the flagship before it hits shelves on January 30. The card replaces the 4090, the Ada Lovelace-based behemoth, with up to twice the performance in video games as per CEO Jensen Huang's CES presentation. This could feel like a quantum leap for gen-on-gen gains, which prompts us to look into the two GPU's specs sheets and hardware details to figure out what's going on under the hood.
Do note that the review embargoes for the 5090 are a couple of weeks later, so there's no chance to validate the company's claims about the performance yet. Read on to find out how the specs compare.
Nvidia RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090: Can the new flagship deliver 2x the performance?
The RTX 5090 has been propped up with even more extreme hardware than the previous generation. This includes everything from a jump in CUDA, Tensor, and RT core count to the VRAM and power delivery. The Blackwell generation also comes with the latest GDDR7 memory standard, as compared to the 4090's GDDR6X. However, a 100% performance improvement still sounds a bit too much.
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Specs comparison
Let's get into the hardware details to find out what the RTX 5090 ships with. For starters, you get the GB202 die, the flagship Blackwell-based consumer chip. Here, 'G' stands for Grace, and 'B' is Blackwell. The 4090, similarly, was also powered by the AD102 chipset.
However, there's quite a difference in what these chips pack under the hood — the 5090 ships with 21,760 CUDA cores, a 33% increase over the last generation. Similarly, the Texture Mapping Unit (TMU) count has gone up by 33%. You get 192 Render Output Units (ROPs) with this GPU as compared to 176 on the older card, a 9% increase.
Moving on, the 5090 also packs 33% more Tensor and RT cores, which should directly translate to better upscaling and ray tracing performance at higher resolutions. The GPU also brings support for DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation that multiplies framerates by 300-400% as shown in Nvidia's demos.
A key highlight of the newer graphics card is the VRAM. The 5090 ships with 32 GB of GDDR7 memory, as opposed to the 4090's 24 GB GDDR6X. This translates to a whopping 1.79 TB/s bandwidth on the newer card, a 78% increase over the last generation.
The detailed specs lists of the two BFGPUs are as follows:
In terms of pricing, the newer GPU has gotten 25% costlier than the 4090. You'll have to shell out at least $1,999 for the flagship. However, given the halo tier the card is targeting with the beefed-up specs, the premium price feels justifiable.
Read more: All RTX 5090 AIB cards compared
Performance comparison
As mentioned, independent performance comparisons of Blackwell graphics cards aren't out yet. We'll have to rely on charts and demos showcased by Nvidia. Across some of the latest games, the 5090 does seem to deliver over twice the performance as compared to the 4090, but that's only with DLSS 4 turned on.
In a tech demo exclusively shown to YouTuber Linus Tech Tips, the RTX 5090 achieved over 260 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K while the 4090 sat at around 100-110 FPS. Nvidia didn't allow the game to be tested at different settings, and let the tech demo run at their fine-tuned versions of the graphics options, however.
Everything was cranked up with the new DLSS 4 neural rendering features for both cards. This enabled the 4090 to output extra framerates while pushing the 5090 to a whole other tier.
Nvidia RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090: Final verdict
The RTX 5090 is a more powerful and premium product than the 4090. Given the gains on the hardware alone, gamers can expect a significant bump in performance. On top of this, you'll have to consider gen-on-gen improvements — each individual core on the 5090 is more capable than the last generation.
Given all these factors, coupled with the new DLSS 4 features, a 100% gain seems attainable in a select few titles. However, across the board, we could be looking at 60-70% better performance.
It is still quite early to estimate how rasterization performance would differ, making it best to wait for independent reviews to drop before pulling the trigger on the Blackwell flagship.
