Nvidia launches the new Series 50 on January 30 2025, see the introduction here:
Press release:
- and Nvidia promises once again great performance:
Problem is that this performance primarily is achieved with DLSS4 - without DLSS4 support, the party is greatly reduced:
Very few VR games support DLSS - and if supported that's DLSS 2.0, like in MADiSON.
To me, DLSS4 is worthless - I only use VR, I never play 2D games. Also DLSS4 does not work with AMD's video cards thereby limiting adoption.
No doubt the RTX 5090 will be faster in plain vanilla 2D or VR games than the 4090, but right now it's unknown how much. Also costing $2k, the 5090 is the most expensive card ever produced by Nvidia and targeted ordinary-ish consumers. The RTX 5080 at $1k may be the sweeter spot for many enthusiasts.
RTX 5090 has 600 watts of power consumption, so easily the most power-hungry gpu so far - but again, we need to see the real benchmark numbers, which hopefully will arrive in a few weeks.
Fun thing, I've been into these launches of new video card since the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics in 1996. That's close to 30 years now. My enthusiasm for new video cards has been much weakened, too high power consumption, too expensive (normally a high-end video card would be about $500), tons of features I don't care about - and then the risk of VR compatibility issues. So never upgrade to a new video card, before Meta supports it - and that can take many months, if ever. Due to potential VR compatibility issues, I'm never an early adopter of new video cards. 2c.
Just some fun trying to project plain vanilla RTX 5090 performance.
TFLOPS (FP32):
RTX 3090 = 36.
RTX 4090 = 83.
RTX 5090 = 105.
Sources:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5090.c4216
We know - based on 4K performance results from TechPowerUp and Guru3D:
A difference from 36 tflops (RTX 3090) to 83 tflops (RTX 4090), which is a performance increase of 131%, resulted in real-world gaming performance increase of 64%.
Based on that, an increase of 2.04 tflops was associated with 1% increase in real-world gaming performance.
An increase of 22 tflops from RTX 4090 to 5090 this way would only predict an increase of 10% in real-world gaming performance - without the use of any DLSS.
I bet RTX 5090 will be faster than 10% compared to RTX 4090 in non-DLSS 2D games, but interesting to see how much...
Current estimates seem to be that Series 50 is about 15 - 30% faster than Series 40 without any DLSS 4:
Even with no DLSS4, the above benchmark results were provided by Nvidia and thus may be biased.
Again, we'll need to wait and see, but first unbiased test results may be here early next week.
