Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition review: Blackwell commences its reign with a few stumbles

For the coming year (starting with the Arc B580 review), we've upgraded our GPU test PC and modernized our gaming test suite. The new system has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, the fastest current CPU for gaming purposes. We also tested the RTX 5090 on our old 13900K test bed, with some at times interesting results. Some games still seem to run faster on Raptor Lake, though overall the 9800X3D delivers higher performance. The margins are of course quite small at 4K ultra.

We're running Windows 11 24H2, with the latest drivers at the time of testing. We used AMD's 24.12.1 drivers, and Nvidia's preview 571.86 drivers for the RTX cards. Note that these changes mean all the results from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, while still valid for when they were run, need to be refreshed. We'll be working on a revised GPU hierarchy in the coming weeks, but it will be a bit before that's fully ready — we want at least all the current generation cards to be included, and there are plenty of new GPUs coming soon.

Our PC is hooked up to an MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED display, which supports G-Sync and Adaptive-Sync, allowing us to potentially experience some of the higher frame rates that GPUs like the 5090 can deliver (especially with MFG). Most games won't get anywhere close to the 240Hz limit of the monitor at 4K when rendering at native resolution, which is where framegen and MFG can be useful.

The new GPU test suite consists of 22 games. We're still looking at some potential changes and additions, but this is where we're at for now. Six of the games in our standard test suite have RT support enabled. The remaining 16 games are run in pure rasterization mode. However, with cards like the RTX 5090, we'll be looking at supplemental testing using some of the most demanding games that feature full RT / "path tracing" support.

All 22 games are tested without any upscaling or frame generation. We do have some additional investigations into things like DLSS 2/3/4 and framegen/MFG, but that's separate from the primary testing. There are noticeable differences between the image quality of DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, as well as differences in how much they can affect performance, which is why we're not using any of them for our baseline measurements.

All games are tested using 1080p 'medium' settings (the specifics vary by game and are noted in the chart headers), along with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K 'ultra' settings. This provides a good overview of performance in a variety of situations. Depending on the GPU, some of those settings don't make as much sense as others, but seeing how a card like the 5090 runs at 1080p can be enlightening. (In this case, 1080p performance is sometimes lower than on a 4090, indicating there's still driver tuning that needs to happen.)

Our test PCs are now running Windows 11 24H2, with all the updates applied. We're also using Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on page seven.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we run some professional and AI application tests. We've previously tested Stable Diffusion, using various custom scripts, but to level the playing field we're turning to standardized benchmarks. We use Procyon, and run the AI Vision test as well as the Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL tests; MLPerf Client 0.5 preview for AI text generation; SPECworkstation 4.0 for Handbrake transcoding, AI inference, and professional applications; 3DMark DXR Feature Test to check raw hardware RT performance; and finally Blender Benchmark 4.3.0 for professional 3D rendering.

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