GeForce RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition Review – Gamer’s Pricey Dream

In just a few hours, NVIDIA will officially launch its next flagship graphics card, the GeForce RTX 5090 Founder's Edition. There might well be shortages or price hikes, but that's another matter entirely. Hardcore PC gamers have been waiting for more than usual (the GeForce RTX 4090 launched in October 2022) to get a new GPU, and they're eager for it despite the high price (the graphics card's official MSRP is $1,999), as shown by the queues that have already started forming outside some stores. Should you be paying that much, though, even if you can afford it? In this article, I'll tackle that question after testing the graphics card strictly from a gamer's point of view.

First of all, some pictures of the hardware component and the package it came in. The GeForce RTX 5090's design is certainly very sleek, and I appreciate that it takes up two slots rather than three.

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If you're a regular Wccftech reader, you're probably well-informed on all the specs and features of the GeForce RTX 5090 through our hardware coverage. Still, a quick recap is in order. This is a monster GPU with 21760 CUDA Cores, 32 GB GDDR7 VRAM, 512-bit memory interface, 3352 AI TOPS for Tensor Cores operations, and 318 TFLOPS for Ray Tracing operations. With all that, it's no wonder it requires 1000W of system power, drawing up to 575W for itself.

On the productivity side, the RTX 50 Series includes hardware support for encoding and decoding the 4:2:2 pro-grade color format, as well as 9th Gen NVENC video encoders and a 6th Gen NVIDIA decoder. NVIDIA also added support for the latest DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 specification, which can go up to 8K@165Hz with Display Stream Compression (DSC).

The GPU is the pinnacle of the brand-new Blackwell architecture, which NVIDIA says is optimized for neural rendering. Doubling down on AI, NVIDIA has created the so-called RTX Neural Shaders (part of the larger RTX Kit suite), small neural networks that can be embedded into programmable shaders. An RTX Neural Shaders SDK lets developers train their game data and shader code on an RTX AI PC and accelerate their neural representations and model weights at run-time with NVIDIA Tensor Cores.

So far, NVIDIA has identified three key applications: RTX Neural Texture Compression, RTX Neural Materials, and RTX Neural Radiance Cache. However, all those will require support from the graphics APIs; Microsoft has already said that the Cooperative Vectors are coming soon to DirectX 12. The Khronos Group will undoubtedly come up with a similar solution for Vulkan. Afterward, though, it will be up to game developers to implement these features in their games. Long story short, it might be a while before we see RTX Neural Shaders applied to actual games, making it automatically not a focus of the GeForce RTX 5090 launch reviews.

The same goes for NVIDIA Reflex 2; the new Frame Warp technology promises to cut down PC latency by up to 75% (the original Reflex reduced latency by up to 50%), which sounds great, especially for Multi Frame Generation since it slightly increases latency. But Reflex 2 isn't available yet - and it won't be exclusive to RTX 50 graphics cards anyway.

What is necessarily at the front and center of every conversation surrounding the new RTX 50 GPUs is, of course, NVIDIA DLSS 4. Now, there's two parts to that: on one hand, NVIDIA has released a new, more advanced upscaling model based on vision transformer technology. So far, DLSS has been based on traditional CNN (convolutional neural network) models. According to NVIDIA, though, these models simply aren't smart enough to make the best choices, which sometimes translates into visual artifacts or ghosting. The new DLSS 4 transformer models are trained on twice the amount of parameters and, according to NVIDIA, already provide better results than CNN models, not to mention they can be further improved over the coming years, whereas CNNs have pretty much reached their maximum capabilities.

The new Ray Reconstruction model already improves image quality, while the Super Resolution model is being released as a beta.

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The new models are available to every GeForce RTX user. Similarly, the new Frame Generation model, which replaces the hardware Optical Flow accelerator with a faster and more efficient AI-based model, is available on both RTX 40 and 50 GPUs.

What's exclusive to Blackwell architecture graphic cards like the GeForce RTX 5090 is DLSS Multi Frame Generation. According to NVIDIA, there's a number of hardware advancements making generating multiple frames possible. The main one is the 5th Gen Tensor Cores, which reportedly offer up to 2.5X more AI processing performance. Moreover, the new graphics cards have been enhanced with hardware Flip Metering capabilities for optimal frame pacing. Previously, Frame Generation relied on traditional CPU-based pacing, which can introduce variability that affects smoothness. With the arrival of DLSS 4, NVIDIA has updated Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation to use Flip Metering instead of CPU-based pacing, allowing the display engine for 40 and 50 Series GPUs to precisely control display timing.

With DLSS Multi Frame Generation, NVIDIA is promising absolutely massive performance gains of up to 8x in the heaviest games, like Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, and Cyberpunk 2077.

However, those best-case scenario frame rate uplifts are measured with the DLSS Performance Mode; in this review, I've instead put the GeForce RTX 5090 through the grinder when using the highest quality DLSS setting available in any game, DLAA or, if that's not an option, Quality Mode.  In all cases, I've enabled the maximum in-game settings without resorting to out-of-game tweaks or mods. 4K resolution has been selected in all instances.

The testing rig is:

• AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI
• 32GB DDR5 6000 MHz G.SKILL Trident Z5
• 2TB NVMe SSD Western Digital Black SN850X

Before starting, it's worth clarifying that all testing was conducted with the latest (not public yet) version of NVIDIA's FrameView software. There's a very good reason for that, as it is presently the only benchmarking software that accurately reports the MsBetweenDisplayChange metrics. With the aforementioned new Flip Metering, NVIDIA says that MsBetweenDisplayChange, rather than MsBetweenPresents, is the best metric to represent what the user actually sees. That's because it is reported near the end of the render pipeline after flip metering has occurred, whereas the measurement of MsBetweenPresents takes place earlier when flip metering hasn't yet paced the frames.

As advised by NVIDIA, I exported FrameView data to be visualized with FLAT (Frame Latency Analytics Tool), which was then used to create the frame time pie charts.

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WCCFTECH RATING

With the release of the GeForce RTX 5090 Founder's Edition, NVIDIA has once again proved why it's the leader in the desktop GPU segment. The new graphics card features potentially groundbreaking new future-facing technologies like RTX Neural Shaders, but even in the here and now, it delivers extremely high performance even when testing the most taxing PC games with the maximum settings. DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is another great advancement that is sure to keep the upscaler well ahead of the increasing competition, though perhaps the most impactful improvement is the hardware flip metering that greatly improves frame pacing and, therefore, smoothness. Once again, the only real downside is the pricing, which has received a sizable bump over the Ada generation, when the RTX 4090 cost $1,599. If money is no object, though, this is the GPU to get to realize all your 4K@200+Hz path traced gamer's dreams.

Pros

• The GeForce RTX 5090 delivers excellent performance in all tested PC games, even without DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation
• The hardware Flip Metering is a game-changer for how much it improves smoothness
• The RTX Neural Shaders ensure the graphics card will remain relevant for years to come

Cons

• The pricing is unfortunately quite a bit higher than last generation

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