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“Nvidia alone at the top” RTX 5090 reviews go live and it’s clear that its rivals won’t come close

What does everyone have to say about the 5090?
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“Nvidia alone at the top” RTX 5090 reviews go live and it’s clear that its rivals won’t come close
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The time has come for hardware reviewers to reveal what they think about the GeForce RTX 5090 – Nvidia’s latest flagship graphics card. You’ll be able to buy a 5090 from January 30th, and reviews for the Founders Edition card have gone live a week ahead of release. That’s unusual in the world of hardware launches – we usually see review embargos lifted the day prior – but we aren’t complaining.

It’s no surprise to see that the 5090 is being praised as “the supercar of graphics cards” considering its list of impressive specs and AI-backed Blackwell architecture. Nvidia has been showing off DLSS 4 benchmarks for a while now, minus the odd outlier, but now we can see a full range of benchmarks in different resolutions.

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RTX 5090 review roundup

We’ve rounded up some of our favorite reviews of the RTX 5090 so far!

TechPowerUp

When it comes to detailed reviews with a wide range of benchmarks, TechPowerUp usually delivers. Right off the bat, we can see that they’ve scored the 5090 a perfect 5/5 stars, giving it an Editor’s Choice award (as well as its ‘But Expensive’ award, if we can call it that). In any case, looking at the average FPS benchmarks, when compared to the RTX 4090, the 5090 FE card offers a 25 FPS uplift at 1080p, 37 FPS at 1440p, and 38 FPS at 4K. That means up to a 34% increase at 4K when looking at rasterization, but the new 50 series card goes far beyond that when harnessing the power of DLSS 4 and its exclusive Multi Frame Gen tech.

The Verge

The RTX 5090 is the “new king of 4K” according to The Verge which means that “Nvidia [is] alone at the top”. Again, that doesn’t come as a surprise. However, they do note that the 5090 isn’t as big of an improvement as the 4090 was over the 3090, particularly in games that don’t support DLSS 4 Multi Frame Gen yet. For reference, there are 75 games and apps that support DLSS 4 at launch. With that in mind, they say that the adoption of DLSS 4 “may turn out to be a lot more important than the actual hardware itself”. DLSS 4, 32GB of RAM, and its slimmed-down two-slot design are listed as some of the card’s pros.

TechRadar

TechRadar scores the RTX 5090 a 4.5 out of 5 stars, noting that the card offers “best-in-market performance” and they also compliment the dual-slot design. It’s worth pointing out that this two-slot design allows the RTX 5090 to quality as an SFF (Small Form Factor) GPU, though this is limited to the Founders Edition model right now. Just like pretty much any review you’ll read right now, the card is labeled as “ludicrously expensive” and the high power draw is also a downside – you’ll need a high-end system to ensure it is well-supported. TechRadar concludes that the value for money is the biggest downside, remarking that you should buy it if “you want the best performance possible” or just “want to flex” – fair enough.


Overall, it’s clear that most reviewers agree on a few things: the card is priced well outside of most people’s budgets, is a marvel of engineering with its dual-slot design, and offers incredible performance at the cost of high power draw. It feels like much of what we said about the RTX 4090 but accelerated even further. The uplift from DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Gen only makes the card even more worthy of the flagship title. With Intel nowhere close and AMD set to rival 5070-level performance, the 5090 is well ahead of the competition – even if it isn’t as big a raster upgrade as last gen comparatively.

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About the Author

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.