Review: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition

How much did you spend on your last graphics card for your PC? Four hundred dollars? A thousand? What would inspire you to spend double that on a GPU? Nvidia thinks you may want to splurge on its new RTX 5090, which showcases the absolute top end of this generation of graphics cards for well-heeled enthusiasts.

The Founders Edition, which comes straight from the brand itself, rather than resellers like MSI and others, is meant to shatter what prior Nvidia cards are capable of, and I’m lucky enough to have one in my gaming PC for testing.

This limited-edition graphics card doesn’t just have to justify its own cost, but the cost of a monitor and power supply that can keep up with it. While I’m excited about what this technology can offer, I am especially happy to share that more affordable, strikingly similar versions of this card will be available to everyone soon.

Compact Power

When I reviewed the Hyte Y60 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) PC case, I mentioned that there wasn’t much room between the glass and the face of the card, and larger cards probably wouldn’t fit. I’m happy to report that the Founders Edition card fits just fine, being only slightly wider than my previous Sapphire 7900 XT ($660), and is actually a bit shorter.

The more compact size is largely thanks to a reconfigured cooler, which places the card’s main PCBs in the center. This allows the fans to blow straight through a set of fins and a vapor chamber, significantly reducing the overall footprint. With cards swelling to three and four slots over recent years, I appreciate the reset back to a two-card standard, which folks should find fits in some surprisingly compact cases.

For most people then, power will be the biggest obstacle. The Founders Edition is rated at 575 watts, and Nvidia recommends a 1,000-watt power supply, but some partner cards may suggest 1,200 watts. You’ll also spot a new, more compact power connector on the side, called 12V-2x6, which replaced the short-lived and ill-fated 12VHPWR connector from the RTX 40 Series cards. I found this page from power-supply manufacturer Corsair particularly helpful in explaining the change, as well as a chart showing different possible setups.

However you arrange it, you’ll need to run a full 600 watts to the card, which means anywhere from two to four dedicated cables running from your PSU. The Founders Edition includes an adapter with a short braided cable, and I imagine partner cards will follow suit, especially given the new standard and high price point of the RTX 5090.

AI-Powered Gaming

The star of the show here is Nvidia’s updated DLSS 4 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology, a suite of features that leverage machine-learning tools to improve gaming performance. This includes updates to Reflex, which helps lower latency, and Super Resolution, which can help upscale games rendered at lower resolutions, among others.

Most notably, DLSS 4 includes a major update to Nvidia’s Frame Generation tech. For each frame the card fully renders from the game, it uses AI to generate additional frames to fill in the gaps. Where the previous version of DLSS 3 could render one frame, the updated version 4, running on 50 Series cards, can generate up to three.

How does it affect performance? To see that in action, I’ll zoom in on two games. The first is Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most demanding games that supports the new DLSS Frame Generation feature before launch. I cranked up the rest of the settings to max in 4K, then raised the number of AI-generated frames to measure the difference using the in-game benchmark.

Armed with a knowledge of how the underlying tech works, it might not surprise you to see a fairly linear leap in frame rate with each additional generated frame. Nvidia has taken advantage of a key performance metric, frames shown to the users, and side-stepped the issue of rendering those frames entirely to show an exponential performance increase. It’s not a lie or a trick: You really are seeing those frames, but the jump from last generation is more typical than these numbers would have you believe.

As you might expect from AI-generated frames, they aren’t perfect—although they’re a massive improvement over the junk memes you may have seen on social media. The system doesn’t have any trouble maintaining the right number of fingers, and it doesn’t hallucinate random heroes into existence in Marvel Rivals.

If you really hunt for them, you can occasionally spot artifacts and oddities, particularly in places where the system has to navigate unique depth challenges. You can see the difference between frame generation being on and off in the screenshot below. With frame generation turned off, the hat in the background warps as it intersects with the fence pattern, and the neon sign in the background loses some of its detail and shape where the lines cross over it.

Certainly things look pretty bad here, but this is a single zoomed-in frame of a full-screen game running at over 250 frames per second. In practice, I only ever noticed the anomalies if I was really looking for them, but keep in mind that I ran this benchmark dozens, if not hundreds of times for this review, so I spent quite a bit of time staring at the screen. That’s helped by the increased smoothness at higher frame rates, which means any oddities that do show up only appear briefly.

I also want to mention Star Wars Outlaws, because there are a ton of shadows, uniquely colored lights, and blaster fire that benefit massively from turning up the ray tracing settings. Unfortunately, even the powerful RTX 5090 has trouble maintaining playable frame rates with everything on High or Ultra.

Even single-frame generation is enough to take the game right to around 60 fps, and generating all three frames results in an average of 120 fps, with every setting all the way up. The experience feels smooth while you’re playing it, so it’s easy to forget you aren’t looking at real frames generated by the game, at least when the action starts up.

I would only lean on frame generation as much as needed to over the refresh rate of your monitor. If you can run without it, your game will look a bit cleaner overall, particularly when it comes to little details in odd lighting situations.

Game Performance

This is all very new tech. At publish, only a few games are able to leverage multiframe generation, but Nvidia says 75 games and apps will add support by January 30. I expect most games with enough graphical fidelity to take advantage of DLSS 4 will support it at launch going forward, or at least some of its features.

Even without Nvidia’s latest machine-learning tech, the RTX 5090 still puts out a tremendous amount of gaming power. I tested it on a 4K display, as well as a 3,440 x 1,440 ultrawide, on our test rig with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and 32GB of RAM. In general, I turned up the settings for each game as high as I could, and either used the in-game benchmark or averaged out a 5- to 10-minute typical play session.

Whether or not you call this a victory will depend on your refresh rate. People with 4K monitors that have a 60-Hz refresh will probably be happy with most of this, but I can imagine some folks with 120-Hz displays will have to tweak settings to consistently stay above 100 fps. It definitely feels like true 4K gaming at the highest end still isn’t quite achievable with current hardware, at least without the help of tech like frame generation that side-steps the issue.

My main gaming monitor is a 1440p ultrawide with a 120-Hz refresh rate, and I know a lot of my friends have gone the same direction. It’s easier to achieve consistently high frame rates, but it’s also a cinematic experience, on a single display, that easily handles two windows for nongaming work.

It's safe to expect 90- to 120-fps performance across most games at this resolution, which is great news for gamers looking to max out their existing monitor. Single player, cinematic-heavy games like Cyberpunk 2022 and Star Wars Outlaws are still on the cutting edge of graphical fidelity, so I’m not necessarily frustrated that they have some room to grow, especially when they look so good already. Online games and shooters like Marvel Rivals run smoothly without much help, and it’s arguably more important to have consistent frame rates in those games.

Is It Worth It for You?

Anyone considering the RTX 5090, the Founders Edition or otherwise, should truly consider their budget first. The FE version of the card will set you back $2,000 if you buy it directly from Nvidia, and the partner cards with overclocking and liquid cooling will likely be even more expensive. You’ll also need to spend around $1,000 for a monitor that truly takes advantage of your newfound graphical power, and potentially a new 1,000-watt or 1,200-watt PSU. That means you could be looking at a $3,500 bill before you have any other parts, and regardless of performance, I have trouble imagining starting any build like that.

The RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 will hit the market at the end of January, with more budget-friendly cards arriving soon after. Without having spent time with the other RTX 50 Series cards, I can’t speak to their relative performance, but I do know their price tags look a lot more appealing. I expect these cards will support multiframe generation out of the box, and that’s awesome news if you just want to sit down and see smooth gameplay.

Previous Founders Edition releases didn't stay in stock for long, so you might have to wake up early on the 30th to snag one of these if you want one. The whole situation makes the RTX 5090 feel less like the top end of the 50 Series, and more like a showpiece.

It's the GPU I'd configure while daydreaming of a new rig, not the first part I’d select in a realistic build on PCPartPicker. If the price tag doesn’t give you a moment of pause, then by all means, enjoy your new GPU. For everyone else, I’d wait and see what the rest of the new GPUs look like before you leap.