Nvidia’s RTX 50-series “Blackwell” graphics cards arrive with this, the RTX 5090. At $2000/£1940, this is an extremely expensive proposition, but it makes some alluring promises in return: best-ever gaming performance from the GB202 GPU, 32GB of high-speed GDDR7 memory for games or content creation, and DLSS 4 with multi frame generation to max out almost any monitor’s maximum refresh rate in supported games. Does it deliver?
To find out, we’ve tested the RTX 5090 Founders Edition in our new suite of challenging titles, looking at RT and raster performance across a range of resolutions and in some of the most demanding scenes we’ve identified from our tech reviews of PC games, many with custom benchmark runs exclusive to Digital Foundry.
Before we get into the benchmark results, let’s cover off the physical design of the card itself, our performance expectations based on its specs and how we’ll be testing it.
It’s immediately apparent that this Nvidia Founders Edition model is by far the most compact flagship card we’ve seen from Team Green in years, with a two-slot design that actually fits into small form factor PCs despite drawing a rated 575W. That magic trick is achieved through a centralised PCB and two flow-through fans, which draw air straight through two impressively dense fin stacks and out the other side. It’s an astonishing piece of industrial design.