Nvidia RTX 5090 vs. RTX 4090: an early spec comparison

Nvidia’s next-generation kingpin, the RTX 5090, is now official, and it’s as mad as the predictions predicted — at least, according to Nvidia. We haven’t had a chance to test this card ourselves yet, but it’s looking set to be an absolute monster, even when compared to its last-generation counterpart. The RTX 4090 is no slouch, though. Until now, it was the fastest graphics card the world had ever seen, and it will remain a fantastic gaming GPU for many years to come.

So, how do these two behemoth graphics cards compare? Let’s take a look.

Pricing and availability

The Nvidia RTX 5090 was announced at CES 2025, with availability starting on January 30. Its recommended retail price is an eye-watering $2,000, however — more like the GPU-shortage pricing for the RTX 4090 than that card’s debut price. When that card debuted in October 2022, its launch price was a comparatively affordable $1,600.

Today you can find Nvidia Founders Edition 4090s for that same price, with third-party options ranging from $1,500 up to $2,000 for those with the most advanced cooling solutions. Nvidia has defended the price, of course, but we won’t know for sure how much extra value it offers until we’re able to see it more in action.

Specs

If we went by the specifications alone, the RTX 5090 should hold a commanding lead over its predecessor in just about any scenario, but all those additional cores and faster memory cells come at the cost of power.

The RTX 5090 is a big generational uplift in a number of ways. It’s got 33% more CUDA cores, which should lead to a strong improvement in general rasterization performance over the 4090, as well as further mitigate the FPS drop caused by demanding visual effects, like ray tracing.

I’d love to tell you that the RTX 5090 has a big increase in the number of RT cores, but unfortunately Nvidia’s marketing uses a new metric for measuring those. While they are based on a new, fourth-generation design, we’ve been given a measurement of 318 TFLOPS. That doesn’t give us much to go on for now, but we can assume a solid improvement in overall RT performance considering the general increases we’ve seen from previous Nvidia generations.

The same goes for Nvidia’s Tensor cores. They’re a new fifth-generation design, with an arbitrary 3,352 “AI TOPS” performance rating, which doesn’t give us the ability to compare it to the previous generation. They do allow for multi-frame generation capabilities, though, which we’ll get to a little later.

On the memory front, we can be much more clear about the big boost Nvidia has given its latest GPU. The RTX 5090 sports a new generation of GDDR7 video memory, and 50% more of it, with 32GB. It’s much faster, at 28Gbps, delivering a near 80% improvement in overall memory bandwidth. That’s massive overkill for gaming, perhaps betraying this card’s design as more of a Titan-esque card, than a flagship gaming GPU — even if it is likely to be the fastest card of its generation.

All of that comes at the cost of power, though, as this flagship Nvidia card once again requires far more than its predecessor. Nvidia claims you’ll need 575W of power for the GPU alone. That’s more power than some modest gaming PCs need in their entirety.

Performance

Nvidia made some grandiose claims about the performance of all its RTX 50-series cards, and while they may be some technical truth to them, it’s not as clear cut as Team Green would have you believe. Until we test these cards ourselves, though, we can’t say for sure how they will perform, so we’ll take a look at Nvidia’s claims and benchmark numbers, and temper our expectations with a dose of skepticism.

As you can see, there are some scenarios where the RTX 5090 can perform at up to twice the speed of the RTX 4090, delivering incredible frame rates in even the most demanding of games with full ray tracing. Impressive stuff!

Those numbers are echoed in similarly AAA games, too, according to Nvidia’s charts. There are no FPS numbers, though, and a big caveat at the bottom. There, Nvidia lets us know that in the games that use DLSS in its testing, it used DLSS 3.5 for the RTX 4090 and DLSS 4 frame generation x 4 with the RTX 5090. Multi-frame generation uses AI to generate multiple frames per rendered frame, leading to much greater increases in frames per second, without the traditional performance required to do it from the main GPU.

That is likely to lead to some latency issues, even with the RTX 5090’s new Nvidia Reflex technology.

While that might leave us guessing about the true performance of this new GPU and how it compares to the RTX 4090, there are a few additional hints on this chart about what we might really be looking at.

In games that don’t support DLSS 4, like Plague Tale: Requiem, the performance difference between the two cards is much less impressive — more like 50% faster, rather than 100% or more. And in Far Cry 6, with no DLSS used at all, we get what may well the the true performance advantage of the RTX 5090: something much closer to a traditional 30% generational improvement.

It would make sense that the RTX 5090 is at its best in RT and DLSS-supporting games, where it can leverage its RT and Tensor cores to aid the GPU. But most games don’t have ray tracing, and almost no games support DLSS 4 yet, so it may be sometime before the RTX 5090’s true capabilities can be realized. Even then, not everyone likes the look or feel of frame generation, and it can be a downright hindrance in competitive games.

The RTX 5090 will be the best, but by how much?

The RTX 5090 isn’t out yet, so if you want the best graphics card money can buy right now, the RTX 4090 is still it. However, once the 5090 debuts at the end of January, the 5090 is almost certainly going to be the new king of the hill. By how much though? That’s still a question to be answered.

Nvidia pushed the limits of credulity with some of its marketing terms and style at CES 2025. It was very clear it didn’t expect any real competition at this level of graphics card, even from AMD. But the RTX 5090 is not going to be twice as fast as the RTX 4090 outside of very specific scenarios, and will likely be around 30% to 50% faster depending on the game. However, as DLSS performance continues to improve and more games adopt multi-frame generation, its performance advantage over the RTX 4090 (and any other GPU out there) will continue to grow.

For now, we’d recommend waiting to see what this new card can do once it’s available for third-party testing. It’s going to be impressive, but that power draw looms large over it and the price puts it outside the realm of realistic purchases for the vast majority of gamers.