Positioning & Architecture
This is our sixth GeForce RTX 5090 review, this time from Gigabyte featuring their "Gaming OC," which is the company's "middle" SKU for the RTX 5090 lineup, right above the WindForce, below Master and Xtreme. Gigabyte has set a rated boost of 2550 MHz for the Gaming OC, or +6% vs the NVIDIA default of 2407 MHz.

The Blackwell architecture introduces several architectural improvements under the hood, like giving all shaders the ability to run FP32 or INT32 instructions, on Ada only half the cores had that ability. The Tensor Cores are now accessible from the shaders through a new Microsoft DirectX API, and they now support FP4 and INT4 instructions which run at lower precision, but much faster with less memory usage. There's numerous additional architecture improvements, we talked about all of them on the first pages of this review.

Compared to last generation's flagship, the RTX 4090, today's RTX 5090 increases the number of GPU cores to 21,760, up from 16,384. Other unit counts are increased, too. One of the highlights is the switch to the brand-new GDDR7 memory, which further increases bandwidth per pin, and NVIDIA bumped the memory bus from 384-bit to 512-bit, which results in a staggering 1.8 TB/s memory bandwidth. From a fabrication perspective nothing has changed though—Blackwell is built on the same 5 nanometer "NVIDIA 4N" TSMC node as last generation's Ada. NVIDIA claims this is a "4 nanometer process," but during Ada it was confirmed that NVIDIA 4N is actually not TSMC N4 (note the order of N and 4), but 5 nanometer. At the end of the day the actual number doesn't matter much, what's important is that NVIDIA is using the same process node.

Performance
We upgraded our test system in preparation for this wave of GPU launches, which is now built on AMD technology with the outstanding Ryzen 7 9800X3D. We've updated to Windows 11 24H2, complete with the newest patches and updates, and have added a selection of new games. At 4K resolution, with pure rasterization, without ray tracing or DLSS, we measured a 41% performance uplift over the RTX 4090. While this is certainly impressive, it is considerably less than what we got from RTX 3090 Ti to RTX 4090 (+51%). NVIDIA still achieves their "twice the performance every second generation" rule: the RTX 5090 is twice as fast as the RTX 3090 Ti. There really isn't much on the market that RTX 5090 can be compared to, it's 75% faster than AMD's flagship the RX 7900 XTX. AMD has confirmed that they are not going for high-end with RDNA 4, and it's expected that the RX 9070 Series will end up somewhere between RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 GRE. This means that RTX 5090 is at least twice as fast as AMD's fastest next-generation card. Compared to the second-fastest Ada card, the RTX 4080 Super, the performance increase is 82%—wow!

Gigabyte's factory overclock turns into a 4% performance improvement at 4K, which is comparable to other factory OC'd cards. The reason these factory OC gains are so small is that that NVIDIA has mastered maximizing out of the box performance for the last generations, even without overclocking.

There really is no question, RTX 5090 is the card you want for 4K gaming at maximum settings with all RT eye candy enabled. I guess you could run the card at 1440p at insanely high FPS, but considering that DLSS 4 will give you those FPS even at 4K, the only reason why you would want to do that is if you really want the lowest latency with the highest FPS.

Ray Tracing & Neural Rendering
NVIDIA is betting on ray tracing and Blackwell comes with several improvements here. Our results show a several percent smaller performance loss from enabling RT, which definitely helps. On top of that, the company is introducing several new optimization techniques that game developers can adopt. The most interesting one is Neural Rendering, which is exposed through a Microsoft DirectX API (Cooperative Vectors). This ensures that the feature is universally available for all GPU vendors to implement, so game developers should be highly motivated to pick it up. Performance in RT is good, at 4K we see a +32% improvement over the RTX 4090. AMD's fastest the RX 7900 XTX is way behind, the RTX 5090 is 2.5x (!) faster in this scenario. AMD has confirmed that for RDNA 4 they have put in some extra love for the RT cores, so hopefully they can catch up a bit.

VRAM
RTX 5090 comes with a staggering 32 GB VRAM size, which is a first for any consumer card. Modern games can't even make use of the 24 GB on RTX 4090, so this increase isn't something that benefits gamers today. I'm having serious doubts that we'll see 32 GB VRAM usage in any game in the next few years, but you never know, maybe next-gen consoles will bump the memory to 32 GB, which could motivate game studios to use that much memory. For creators and AI, this capability is useful though, as it lets them run larger problems, but that also means that these people, with deep pockets, will snatch away cards from gamers. When looked at from a different angle, 32 GB makes sense though. If you want to build a graphics card with a 512-bit memory bus, you will end up with 16 memory chips, which means your choices are either 16 GB or 32 GB. 16 GB wouldn't make sense for the RTX 5090, so 32 GB is the only logical choice, despite the increase in cost and design complexity.

DLSS 4 Upscaling & Frame Generation
NVIDIA made a big marketing push to tell everyone how awesome DLSS 4 is, and they are not wrong. First of all, DLSS 4 Multi-Frame-Generation. While DLSS 3 doubled the framerates by generating a single new frame, DLSS 4 can now triple or quadruple the frame count. In our testing this worked very well and delivered the expected FPS rates. Using FG, gaming latency does NOT scale linearly with FPS, but given a base FPS of like 40 or 50, DLSS x4 works great to achieve the smoothness of over 150 FPS, with similar latency than you started out with. Image quality is good, if you know what to look for you can see some halos around the player, but that's nothing you'd notice in actual gameplay.

Want lower latency? Then turn on DLSS 4 Upscaling, which lowers the render resolution and scales up the native frame. In the past there were a lot of debates whether DLSS upscaling image quality is good enough, some people even claimed "better than native"—I strongly disagree with that—I'm one of the people who are allergic to DLSS 3 upscaling, even at "quality." With Blackwell, NVIDIA is introducing a "Transformer" upscaling model for DLSS, which is a major improvement over the previous "CNN" model. I tested Transformer and I'm in love. The image quality is so good, "Quality" looks like native, sometimes better. There is no more flickering or low-res smeared out textures on the horizon. Thin wires are crystal clear, even at sub-4K resolution! You really have to see it for yourself to appreciate it, it's almost like magic. The best thing? DLSS Transformer is available not only on GeForce 50, but uses Tensor Cores on all GeForce RTX cards! While it comes with a roughly 10% performance hit compared to CNN, I would never go back to CNN. While our press driver was limited to a handful of games with DLSS 4 support, NVIDIA will have around 75 games supporting it on launch, most through NVIDIA App overrides, and many more are individually tested, to ensure best results. NVIDIA is putting extra focus on ensuring that there will be no anti-cheat drama when using the overrides.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
Gigabyte's RTX 5090 Gaming OC follows the design theme set by previous generation Gaming OC cards. Black and various shades of gray are the primary colors, paired with some white highlights. Out of the box, Gigabyte's card is the loudest RTX 5090 that we've tested so far. With 42 dBA, it is even a little bit louder than the NVIDIA Founders Edition, which is a compact dual-slot design. While temperatures are certainly excellent with 71°C, it feels to me like Gigabyte went a bit overboard with their fan settings, focusing on low temperatures way too much, which results in a noisy gaming experience. The good thing is that the card comes with a dual BIOS feature, which lets you enable a "quiet" BIOS. Now the card really runs quiet, reaching only 32 dBA, which is one of the best results in our test group. Temperatures are still fine—80°C, which is perfectly safe of course.

Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test reveals that the Gigabyte cooler sits roughly in the middle of our test group, definitely stronger than the FE thermal solution, but not nearly as strong as what we've seen on the MSI Suprim, for example. Compared to the Founders Edition, at the same heat load and noise level, the cooler runs 13.5°C cooler.

PCI-Express 5.0
NVIDIA's GeForce Blackwell graphics cards are the first high-end consumer models to support PCI-Express 5.0. This increases the available PCIe bandwidth to the GPU, yielding a small performance benefit. Of course PCIe Gen 5 is backwards compatible with older versions, so you'll be able to run the RTX 5090 even in an older computer.

Just like we've done over the years, we took a detailed look at PCI-Express scaling in a separate article. Testing includes x8 Gen 5, for instances when an SSD is eating some lanes. The popular x16 4.0 was tested, which is common on many older CPUs and entry-level motherboards. Finally, some additional combinations were run, down to PCIe x16 1.1. The results confirm that unless you are on an ancient machine, PCIe bandwidth won't be a problem at all.

Power Consumption
Gigabyte's card runs at an increased power limit of 600 W, +25 W higher than the Founders Edition, which is good. Additional power limit increases aren't allowed, because 600 W is the limit of the connector. Despite the high absolute power number, the efficiency (with FPS results taken into account) is good—similar to the RTX 5090 FE. On the Founders Edition we measured very high non-gaming power draw of 30+ W, the Gaming OC runs a tiny bit better than that, but still high. Hopefully NVIDIA can address this.

Overclocking
Overclocking the Gigabyte Gaming OC worked very well, and we gained +8.5% in real-life performance, on top of the factory overclock—very impressive. Unfortunately NVIDIA is limiting the maximum overclocking for the GDDR7 memory chips to +375 MHz—usually NVIDIA doesn't have any OC limits. I guess that's just another bug that will be fixed eventually—we really want to push these memory chips to the max!

Pricing & Alternatives
The official Gigabyte MSRP for the RTX 5090 Gaming OC is $2350, but of course, right now the card is sold out and scalpers are asking for thousands of dollars—just like for any other RTX 5090. It seems new supply is still a few weeks away, so it doesn't look like the situation will be improving any time soon. At the MSRP, the Gigabyte card is 18% more expensive than the $2000 NVIDIA Founders Edition, which is a pretty steep increase for a factory overclock that yields 4% in additional performance. The cooling solution is definitely more powerful, but the fairly loud default fan settings are definitely not a selling point. What helps is that the quiet BIOS runs pretty good—this definitely makes the card a good option for gamers looking for a quiet RTX 5090 model—and I can see how this crowd would be willing to pay the extra cost.

Generally, the RTX 5090 is very expensive, but it is the best and everyone wants to have one. AMD, the next-closest competitor, lacks the raw performance, and they don't have anything to counter software features like DLSS multi-frame-generation and the new Transformer upscaler model. NVIDIA's dominance with game studios will ensure that DLSS 4 support is coming to virtually all new releases—no doubt. Previous generation RTX 40 cards aren't obsolete at all, though. Thanks to DLSS Transformer you're getting a free image quality upgrade on all RTX cards. Also, isn't gameplay the most important thing? Rather than graphics? Are games fun at 1080p, with medium settings? Absolutely, as long as the game is good.