Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 FE review: Next-Level Gaming

GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition

Today ends the information embargo on tests of Nvidia’s top-tier GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card. It delivers extreme performance but at the cost of unprecedented power consumption and the highest price yet. Even so, it is expected to attract immense interest from gamers and professionals for its 32 GB of memory and exceptional application performance.

I didn’t have much time to write a big introduction, but we already know the essentials that you usually find in the introduction from previous articles. We covered the parameters of the card when it was introduced at CES. We took a look at the RTX 5090 Founders Edition’s design details during the unboxing on Monday. And the Blackwell architecture and new technologies will be covered in more detail by Jan Olšan in a separate article.

We have a freshly assembled new and more powerful test build with the gaming CPU AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D, on which I haven’t managed to measure much yet. Most of the games with support for the new generation of DLSS and multi-frame generation, as well as some of the application tests, are still in non-public betas that I only got my hands on yesterday, so there hasn’t been much room for any extensive testing yet. Added to these will be the ability to force new DLSS modes via the Nvidia app. Nvidia has announced support for 75 titles and apps, with only two games testable in the drivers for reviewers as of yet.

For this reason, only a few results will be included in the graphs for now. But there’s also not much that can be directly compared to the GeForce RTX 5090. Along with the RTX 4090, these are cards in their own performance and, unfortunately, price category. So today we’ll look at the essentials – how the RTX 5090 performs compared to the RTX 4090 in a few games, and we’ll add more games and cards as we go along. Today marks the end of the information embargo on the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. Then during tomorrow, tests of the GeForce RTX 5090 from other manufacturers can be published. Not many RTX 5090 samples have arrived in our region yet, so we’ll only offer Founders Edition tests for now, but I’ll at least prepare the results from other tests for tomorrow and we’ll take a look at more RTX 5090s as soon as they become available.

In a week’s time, we’ll also look at the RTX 5080, RTX 4080 results, and add at least the Radeon RX 7900 XTX to the comparison, the loan of which has been delayed, but it’s on the way. There are several more cards coming from Nvidia, AMD and Intel in the next couple of weeks, so the bars in the graphs will already be adding up fast.

A new extreme on the market

Already in the last generation, the RTX 4090 had no direct competition. In the case of the RTX 5090 it will be even worse, AMD has already announced in advance that it will not build a competitor to the RTX 5090, but probably not even to the RTX 5080. Thus, the RTX 5090 has a unique position on the market. Like the previous top-of-the-line RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 Ti models and the Titan generation, it balances between a high-end card for gamers and a powerful yet relatively cheap solution for professional use (cheap in relation to cards designed for professional use, of course).

It uses a graphics chip with the new Blackwell architecture manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process node. It is equipped with the largest next-generation chip with 21,760 CUDA cores (stream processors), 680 texture units and 192 rasterization units. It features 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus, providing bandwidth up to 1.79 TB/s. The base core clock speed is 2017 MHz with an option to boost up to 2407 MHz. The card already supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, and of course acceleration of ray tracing and computations used in the field of artificial intelligence.

A more detailed comparison of the parameters is given in the following table.

Today we’ll be looking at the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. We got an outside look at it on Monday. Now we’ll add a look at the GPU-Z data and the list of sensors available in HWiNFO.

The card is not yet fully supported in both applications, but preliminary support has already been offered by the HWiNFO author in beta, and there are still some sensor readings to be sorted out – for example, the hotspot reading of 255°C regardless of the card’s actual temperature and load is obviously incorrect.

Test build

I don’t test graphics cards openly on a desk like most reviewers, I use a classic gaming PC for measurements. The components are mounted in a Fractal Design Meshify 2 case. To give you an idea, for now I’ll borrow a photo of another build in the same case, which you may have come across in articles dedicated to system cooling. It also features a quartet of 140mm fans in all available positions. All system fans have their speeds reduced to about 780 rpm. The build is not completely silent, but it can cool even high performance cards with high power consumption.

Inside is the newer Aorus X870 Elite WiFi7 motherboard, which is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D processor. The cooling of the processor is taken care of by the new Noctua NH-D15 G2 in the offset position. The processor is complemented by 64GB of DDR5-6000 memory in two modules from Kingston, and the system and data are stored on a 4TB SSD from the same manufacturer. The whole setup is powered by the top-of-the-line 1300W Be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 PSU.

Below is a picture of the configuration and current system settings and the version of Windows used for testing. The memories are set to an EXPO profile with DDR5-6000 32-38-38-38-1,350V with XMP/EXPO High Bandwidth Support set to Enabled, Infinity Fabric Frequency and Dividers manually set to 2000 MHz and the UCLK DIV1 MODE divider set to UCLK=MEMCLK.

The SVM Enable setting is deactivated in the advanced processor settings for higher performance and the “Core Isolation” setting in Windows Security is also deactivated.

Furthermore, the Radeon graphics adapter integrated in the processor and the integrated SATA controller are manually deactivated.

• Contents
• GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition
• 3DMark, Cyberpunk 2077
• Black Myth: Wukong, F1 24
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Satisfactory
• Clock, Temperatures, Power, Fan speed and noise
• A closing summary