2 Steps Back 1 Step Forward

This year at CES, an event for companies to unveil new tech, Nvidia showed their new RTX 5000 series cards for desktop and mobile. Their previous launch from RTX 3000 to RTX 4000 saw an improvement of around 75%, leading to similar expectations this year, or at least a 30% improvement. 

However, the raw performance is a mere 20% better in 4k rendering, which begs the question, what justifies the $2000 price tag? 

The answer is their new technology, DLSS 4.0. DLSS, also known as Deep Learning Super Sampling, is an AI technology that allows for more frames per second (fps), higher video resolution, and faster rendering. It improves fps by using AI to predict what will come next. 

It also improves video quality by descaling the video or image quality, taking some burden off the cuda cores, and using its AI cores to upscale the image, leading to better performance. It uses the same video quality upscaling to speed up rendering. 

Compared to the previous generation flagship of Nvidia, the 4090, this new card outperforms the old model by around 30 percent while being 25 percent cheaper, a good sign for the 5090.

The new multiframe-gen of the 5000 is capable of multiplying frames per second up to 4 times. This would lead Cyberpunk, a very demanding game with typically sub 100 fps, to run well in the 200s. 

However, this technology has its flaws. For example, the details in the background sometimes can get very warped, a bad sign for the 5090.

When compared to the RX 7900 XTX in terms of raw performance, the 5090 is only 30 percent more powerful, yet around 3 times the price. However, programs are starting to demand ray-tracing in 2025, in which AMD falls behind greatly.

Now, let’s compare the 5090 against the other 5000 series cards. 

For starters, Nvidia claims the lowest-end 5000 series card as of date, priced at a mere $550, has the same performance as the 4090, the highest-end 4000 series card priced at a whopping $1600. However, this is not the full story. 

According to userbenchmark, the 5070 ti, a card superior to the 5070, is 30 percent lower in overall performance compared to the 4090. This is because of all the new technologies previously mentioned, exclusive to 5000 series cards.

So, is the 5090 a good card? Absolutely. But is it worth it? Only for AI enthusiasts.