Nvidia’s top dog has been put to the test, showing impressive generational gains. Though gaming performance may not jump up as much, we are optimistic as these results somewhat concord with official claims.
With only one week remaining before reviews go live, RTX 5090 performance leaks are starting to pop out. Among these, we find a bunch of Geekbench tests which allow us to directly compare the new flagship performance to its predecessor.
According to these, the RTX 5090 is between 26.3% and 37% faster than RTX 4090, with up to 359,742 points in Geekbench’s Vulkan test. A great uplift that comes close to Nvidia’s official gaming benchmarks. The latter showed a 32% improvement in ray-traced Resident Evil 4. Better yet, these are raw figures, excluding any DLSS 4 or frame generation boosts, which are becoming unavoidable. We can even expect further developer adoption as users get more comfortable with upscaling.
On the other hand, the Open CL test saw mild performance gains ranging from 6.7% to 15.8%, scoring up to 367,740 points. While not as impressive as Vulkan results, these are still fine, especially considering Open CL’s general-purpose and compute nature. And besides, Nvidia has its own CUDA stack, covering this aspect in a more optimised manner. Vulkan however is a graphics API designed for rendering real-time 3D visuals, making it more suitable to compare against Nvidia’s performance claims
Though their impact may be limited, note that these tests were run on Intel Core i9-12900K systems filled with 64GB of DDR4-3600 RAM. Until we get 3DMark results, these are as close as we can get to gaming performance.
What is sure is that RTX 5090 shapes to be a monster GPU worthy of its flagship status. Drivers and game optimisation should push it even further as time goes on, but AI upscaling will do the job if otherwise. We should get the final word soon enough as reviews are scheduled for January 23.
