Friday, January 17th 2025
NVIDIA RTX 5090 Geekbench Leak: OpenCL and Vulkan Tests Reveal True Performance Uplifts
The RTX 50-series fever continues to rage on, with independent reviews for the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 dropping towards the end of this month. That does not stop benchmarks from leaking out, unsurprisingly, and a recent lineup of Geekbench listings have revealed the raw performance uplifts that can be expected from NVIDIA's next generation GeForce flagship. A sizeable chunk of the tech community was certainly rather disappointed with NVIDIA's reliance on AI-powered frame generation for much of the claimed improvements in gaming. Now, it appears we can finally figure out how much raw improvement NVIDIA was able to squeeze out with consumer Blackwell, and the numbers, for the most part, appear decent enough.
Starting off with the OpenCL tests, the highest score that we have seen so far from the RTX 5090 puts it around 367,000 points, which marks an acceptable jump from the RTX 4090, which manages around 317,000 points according to Geekbench's official average data. Of course, there are a plethora of cards that may easily exceed the average scores, which must be kept in mind. That said, we are not aware of the details of the RTX 5090 that was tested, so pitting it against average scores does seem fair. Moving to Vulkan, the performance uplift is much more satisfying, with the RTX 5090 managing a minimum of 331,000 points and a maximum of around 360,000 points, compared to the RTX 4090's 262,000 - a sizeable 37% improvement at the highest end. Once again, we are comparing the best results posted so far against last year's averages, so expect slightly more modest gains in the real world. Once more reviews start appearing after the embargo lifts, the improvement figures should become much more reliable.
Sources:
BenchLeaks, VideoCardz
Starting off with the OpenCL tests, the highest score that we have seen so far from the RTX 5090 puts it around 367,000 points, which marks an acceptable jump from the RTX 4090, which manages around 317,000 points according to Geekbench's official average data. Of course, there are a plethora of cards that may easily exceed the average scores, which must be kept in mind. That said, we are not aware of the details of the RTX 5090 that was tested, so pitting it against average scores does seem fair. Moving to Vulkan, the performance uplift is much more satisfying, with the RTX 5090 managing a minimum of 331,000 points and a maximum of around 360,000 points, compared to the RTX 4090's 262,000 - a sizeable 37% improvement at the highest end. Once again, we are comparing the best results posted so far against last year's averages, so expect slightly more modest gains in the real world. Once more reviews start appearing after the embargo lifts, the improvement figures should become much more reliable.
33 Comments on NVIDIA RTX 5090 Geekbench Leak: OpenCL and Vulkan Tests Reveal True Performance Uplifts
So, with regards to Vulkan, the card is a bit more efficient, has a bit more IPC, but the overwhelming majority of the improvement comes from increased CUDA core counts and power consumption.
It's a throwaway generation really, we really are nearing stagnation.
The price will keep increasing while there are people paying. 1:1 perf% x price% may be the norm, but just until people stop swallowing ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Combine the core count and frequency increases and you get a number higher than the actual performance increase.
This is definitely a tock generation and one of the most lackluster one's at that. It's Nvidia's equivalent to the R9 300 series. No IPC gains, no efficiency gains, no new marquee features (only updates to existing ones).
The 5090 is an example of 33% more physical hardware generating a 37% more performance, so your hypothetical double 4090 would be more than double as fast.
I'm not quite sure how you interpret a 33% more hardware for 37% faster as "average to bad".
power doesn't, it's just a side effect of more hardware drawing current at once
bandwidth doesn't, it's just a side effect of needing to feed more hardware without starving it
vram doesn't, it adds zero performance and is simply required to hold the data. Not having enough means you simply cannot run those settings or that dataset for simulation/LLM/compute.
I have always had the opinion, if there isnt anything meaningful to release, then dont release it. Its so annoying we have instead this "release to a schedule, so there is always something new out there".
The 5000 series by far the best thing about it is the slimmer coolers and angled connectors. Does that warrant a new generation by itself? Probably not, instead release a rev 2 model with these shroud improvements, but I expect they wanted to use the new chips for the AI market, which has really led to the change on the consumer side as well, as well as of course marketing reasons.
If software hadnt become so inefficient, we could be all using 1080ti's getting 300fps every game. Or rather playing at 60fps consuming 50w.
According to MLID, an Nvidia employee said that even Nvidia employees have limited stock in their own employee store.
I don't know if that's poor yields on such a gargantuan chip, or a result of the 5090 being too valuable to sell to gamers at "$2000" when the same silicon can be sold for $10000+ as an RTX 6000B workstation or server card instead. Remember, every 4090 that hit the market was because Nvidia had temporarily satisfied all the RTX 6000A customers willing to pay $8000+ for the exact same silicon.