RTX 5090 shows only marginal performance improvements over RTX 4090

According to TechSpot, although Nvidia’s RTX 50 series graphics cards have yet to be officially released, early performance benchmarks for the RTX 5090 suggest only modest improvements over its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Results from Geekbench 5 show that the RTX 5090 scored 367,740 points in the OpenCL test, marking a 15% increase over the RTX 4090. In the Vulkan test, the card scored 359,742 points, 37% higher than the RTX 4090.

In CUDA-based tests, the RTX 5090 achieved a score of 542,157 points, a 27% increase compared to the RTX 4090’s 424,332 points. While these figures are impressive, the performance gains fall short of expectations, especially considering that the RTX 5090 features 32% more CUDA cores than the RTX 4090.

The RTX 5090 was also tested on Blender 3.6.0, achieving an average score of 17,822.17, approximately 36% faster than the RTX 4090’s score of 13,064.17 on the same software version. On Blender 4.3.0, the RTX 5090D, a model designed exclusively for the Chinese market, scored 14,706.65 points, 40% higher than the RTX 4090D’s 10,516.64 points.

However, experts caution that results from synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench or Blender may not fully reflect real-world gaming performance. Users will need to wait for detailed tests on popular games to accurately assess the RTX 5090’s capabilities.

In addition to the RTX 5090, Nvidia introduced the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 at the CES 2025 event in the U.S. The RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are set to officially launch on January 30, while the two RTX 5070 models will arrive next month. Despite featuring numerous upgrades compared to the Ada Lovelace generation, these new GPUs are also priced higher.

The marginal performance improvements of the RTX 5090 over the RTX 4090 raise questions about the real value of this new GPU lineup for users, especially as real-world tests remain an unknown factor.

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