I’m such a dirty traitor.
For the past two years, no other piece of computing tech has brought me more joy than my Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. Up until just over a week ago, it was the best consumer GPU on the planet. But now? I want to cast it aside like it was a carton of expired (extremely expensive) milk.
And it’s all the RTX 5090’s fault.
Bolstered by enticing AI features that are squarely focused on boosting in-game frame rates, Team Green’s latest flagship graphics card is predictably a specs monster. Shocking, I know.
DLSS 4! Gen 4 ray tracing cores! 32GB of GDDR7 RAM! Fifth generation tensor cores! Latency-slaying Nvidia Reflex 2! A ludicrous number of CUDA cores — 21,760, up from the 4090’s “meagre” 16,384. Are you getting all hot and bothered yet?
Then there’s the small matter of Multi-Frame Generation. AI-driven frame gen tech was first introduced with the RTX-40 Series, and it’s capable of seriously bumping up a game’s fps numbers in some of the best PC games.
Now that the RTX 50-Series is upon us, those gains are even greater. There are already YouTube videos out there of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty running at 4K with every ray tracing slider maxed out running at close to 200fps. And here I’ve been slumming my way through the seedy, neon-bathed streets of Night City at a pathetic 120 frames per second over the last year. First World problems indeed.
75 games will soon support Multi-Frame Generation and DLSS 4, and that’s great news for folks lucky enough to own one of the best gaming monitors. Such titles include ace games such as Diablo 4, God of War: Ragnarök, Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020), and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor — all titles that are getting on a little but will shortly play more smoothly than ever.
Not that you actually need an RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 to enjoy Nvidia’s latest version of deep learning super sampling. Happily, every Team Green GPU from the RTX-30 Series onwards supports DLSS 4, making the need to splash out for Nvidia’s $1,999 / £1,939 a smidge less pressing.
Sorry, did I say $1,999? Silly me. That’s the official MSRP. Obviously the RTX 5090 sold out within seconds on launch day — scalpers gonna scalp and bots gonna bot etc. That means you’ve got more chance of winning the Powerball than picking up the fastest GPU ever made at its official price tag.
Do yourself a favor, will you? Don’t look at what far too many scoundrels are trying to flog 5090s for on eBay.
I SAID DON’T!
Men in Blackwell
Built on Nvidia’s new Blackwell tech, what AI brings to this cutting edge GPU architecture is pretty gobsmacking. It’s one of the reasons why Indiana Jones & The Great Circle can be played in 4K at “Supreme” settings with frame rates hovering around the 150 mark (thanks, Digital Foundry). My inner fps snob is all in on these ludicrous numbers in a way I should probably be concerned about.
As much as I’m lusting for an RTX 5090, I realize the chances of me owning one at any point in the next year or so are absurdly slim. Although that said, what’s the going rate for a spleen these days? And do I really need mine?
The cost factor doesn’t just stop with the physical price of the flagship GPUs to end all GPUs, though. Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5090 is considerably more power-hungry than the 4090. While the former best graphics card in the world draws in 450W of juice, that number jumps to 575W with the Nvidia’s latest and greatest. Will Team Green not think of my already skyrocketing electricity bills?!
Yet I can’t deny the RTX 5090 and its bleeding edge AI features aren’t scratching an itch that’s been there since the days I thought artificial intelligence was purely a thing that was going to finally make Terminators a reality.
The notion of being able to play the best Steam games on my LG G3 OLED graphically maxed out at my TV’s 120Hz refresh rate has me salivating. Sorry for the dribble.
Since I got back into PC gaming after years of exclusively playing on consoles when I built a GTX 970-powered rig purely for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I’ve become far too obsessed with frame rates. An admittedly contradictory statement, considering I’ve spent most of the past week pummeling hordes of zombies in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster at a barely locked 30fps on Valve’s incredible Steam Deck OLED.
But once Geralt and that 970 showed me how much the best gaming PCs could slaughter consoles purely from a performance point of view, there was no going back. That’s why I’ll undoubtedly sell my RTX 4090 in the not too distant future in order to fund a bank balance-shattering outlay for a 5090.
Nvidia ACE
Not that I’m completely thrilled by every AI aspect the RTX 50-Series is bringing to the table. Take Nvidia ACE as a prime example. Though we’re unlikely to see it in action in real-world games this year, the demo the world’s leading GPU manufacturer released last year chills me to my brittle bones.
A suite of tech that is capable of creating NPCs (non-playable characters) in games using generative AI, it potentially represents a future where video game characters are no longer written or scripted by actual humans. That’s scary to me.
The gaming industry already has severe problems with overworking “crunch” periods that can be incredibly punishing on developers for months on end.
The idea that these amazing artists’ skills and dedication could be pushed aside in big budget games because ACE might be capable of replacing them is not something I’ll ever be able to get onboard with.
I hope this isn’t me being overly idealistic, but I hope the future of the RTX-5090 and its formidable AI features work to make developers’ jobs easier, not replace them.
In the here and now, though, I’m mainly focused on a piece of tech that I undeniably desire, but even by my high-end computing tastes, is probably overkill. After all, I’m hardly a budding eSports champ of the future.
Duty calls
Hell, I can barely score a headshot in a frenzied online match of Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Do I really need a graphics card that was designed with hardcore gamers who play on 240Hz monitors?
The GPU-obsessed heart wants what the heart wants, though. I’ve been in thrall to every new generation of Nvidia cards for over a decade at this point. I don’t see that habit changing anytime soon.
Perhaps I should be glad scalpers have made my hopes of installing an RTX 5090 and its game-changing AI features into my home-built rig. Actually, screw that. All scalpers need to get in the sea.
I just hope that by the time the RTX-6090 rolls around in a few years, Nvidia might actually have enough stock in place that the most committed of gamers can buy future flagship cards for their actual market value.
For the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to make do with my 4090. Oh what a cruel world. But hey, us RTX-30 and RTX-40 owners can still reap the benefits of DLSS 4, right? That’s something at least.
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