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.
Results are in from the only site I really trust - no DLSS4 mumbo-jumbo, and still very impressive results for the 5090:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-founders-edition/34.html
That's a 33% performance increase from the RTX 4090, which already is very fast. And it's 133% faster than my RTX 3090, and that will usually translate to about twice the speed in VR games and apps. Going from GTX 1080 to RTX 3090 was much the same 130% uplift.
There's one caveat though - and I thought the RTX 3090 was bad for a green planet, lol:
That's a massive 600 watts in sustained power consumption - these are not peak consumptions, but average numbers.
TechPowerUp used a 1000 w PSU for the testing.
Maybe the 5080 will be a sweeter spot for many, possibly delivering RTX 4090 performance and much lower power consumption than the 5090. I'm not holding my breath though 🙂
All in all - 5090 is 33% faster than 4090, and 5090 uses 43% more power than the 4090, and the latter is not very impressive.
Btw, this is the new Asus RTX 5090 Astral:
- and this is my Asus Strix OC RTX 3090 - which I thought was big, lol:
Here the Asus 5090 is again followed by my 3090:
The weight also doubled from about 1500 grams (Asus Strix 3090) to 3000 grams (Asus 5090 Astral). I wonder if this massive weight is going to cause some mainboard issue - it's a lot of weight to carry for the PCIe slot.
As can be seen, Asus added another fan to the 5090. Still Asus did bring down the noise with the Quiet bios:
- it's 2.5 dBA more than the 3090 - remember that perceived loudness doubles when dBA increases by about 8 dBA:
Thus Asus did work wonders keeping the 600 watts power consumption quiet. Then again, like with the MSI GamingX GTX 1080, MSI still is king of air-cooled Nvidia flagship video cards. The air-cooled MSI RTX 5090 is virtually silent and a massive 8 dBA below Asus, thereby reducing perceived loudness by 50%:
Asus may be 1-2% faster than MSI, but for silence lovers, nothing beats the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim - at $2400 it's also cheaper than the Asus RTX 5090 Astral at $2800:
The most quiet air-cooled RTX 5090 card in the word - the MSI Suprim (Suprim = Supreme)
Low noise could raise temperatures, but MSI is still doing an amazing job here - see temps from Asus and MSI 5090s here:
The Nvidia Founders Edition 5090 runs a massive 14 degrees hotter than Asus and MSI even using their low-noise cooler settings. But getting those low-noise coolers will cost an arm or a leg 😉
I paid $2850 for my Asus Strix 3090 in 2021, but not many bought those cards - I do wonder if the new high-end RTX 5090 cards at $ 2500 - 3000 will sell like hot cakes... 🤔
