The reveal of the RTX 5090 has been an eye-opener, especially when you look at the performance gains that Nvidia has been boasting in its official benchmark results. For the time being, there is plenty of discussion around differences in rasterization performance between the two generations, especially with DLSS 4 looking like it plays a large part in the performance boost.
Regardless, it’s hard to deny just how much difference there is between the RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090 when it comes to in-game FPS. Cyberpunk 2077 is one title that Nvidia has been keen to show off, detailing results in its launch day press release. Since then, popular YouTuber Linus Tech Tips has enjoyed a hands-on comparison of the two flagships.
| Specification | RTX 5090 | RTX 4090 |
|---|---|---|
| CUDA cores | 21,760 | 16,384 |
| Base clock speed | 2.01 GHz | 2.23 GHz |
| Boost clock speed | 2.41 GHz | 2.52 GHz |
| Memory | 32GB GDDR7 | 24GB GDDR6X |
| Memory interface | 512-bit | 384-bit |
| Memory clock | 28 Gbps | 21 Gbps |
| Memory bandwidth | 1.79 TB/s | 1.01 TB/s |
| TDP | 575W | 450W |
| Power connector | 12V-2×6 | 12V-2×6 |
| Release date | Jan 2025 | Oct 2022 |
RTX 5090 utilizes DLSS 4 to hit over 250 FPS in CP 2077 max settings
Nvidia has already let us know that the RTX 5090 doubles the RTX 4090’s performance with DLSS and Full Ray Tracing, citing Cyberpunk 2077 as one such game to achieve this. Alan Wake 2 and Black Myth: Wukong show similar results. However, now we can get a close look at the actual framerate difference with DLSS 4 for both cards thanks to a new video from Linus Tech Tips.
For example, with the RTX 4090 hitting around 125 FPS, the 5090 is often more than double that at 250+. For both systems, “absolutely everything is cranked”, and the RTX 4090 is even running on a newer unreleased build that includes Nvidia’s new Transformer model and DLSS 4 frame gen, though it won’t have access to the new multi-frame gen feature that is locked to 50 series cards. This feature AI generates up to three additional frames to help boost the framerate tremendously (compared to the one additional frame the 40 series’ is allowed).
There’s some time to wait before we can get a real comparison of these two cards in terms of rasterization. In fact, in the same video up above, Linus reveals that the RTX 50 series performance embargo comes “in a couple of weeks” – this might allow us to see more benchmarks across a wider range of games, settings, and resolutions.
