The $2000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is put to the test in creative software and artificial intelligence, completely surpassing the competition.
The powerful card excels in artificial intelligence tasks, although it may be excessive for other types of applications.
Nvidia has launched its most advanced GPU, the GeForce RTX 5090, during CES 2025. This new model, expected to sell out quickly, is the successor to the RTX 4090 and is built on the Blackwell architecture. The RTX 5090 includes 32 GB of VRAM, a larger number of CUDA cores, and improved memory bandwidth.
Puget Systems, a firm that previously evaluated the GeForce RTX 4090, has tested the RTX 5090 in various creative applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve. The results have been outstanding. In Premiere Pro, this new model showed a performance increase of 9% compared to its predecessor. In DaVinci Resolve Studio, it achieved a 17% advancement over the RTX 4090 and a 35% improvement against the 3090 Ti. It is noteworthy that the RTX 5090 was tested on a different version of Resolve, created to be fully compatible with the new series.
The performance of the RTX 5090 has also been remarkable in After Effects, where a 35% improvement in 3D rendering was reported compared to the RTX 4090, making it an attractive option for motion graphics professionals. In the Unreal Engine, the new GPU maintains a 17% advantage over the RTX 4090 in overall performance.
In rendering application tests, such as Blender and V-Ray, the RTX 5090 outperformed the 4090 by 38% and was three times faster than the 3090 Ti. Additionally, it bested AMD's fastest model, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, in multiple tests. However, the latter faced several challenges, especially in After Effects, where the 7900 XTX showed significantly lower performance in the 'Advanced 3D' renderer.
Despite the promising benchmarks, some software compatibility issues have been identified. Currently, the RTX 5090 is not compatible with Redshift or Octanebench and has performance issues in CUDA rendering with V-Ray, although Nvidia anticipates resolving these difficulties through future driver updates.
With a launch price of $2,000, the RTX 5090 is positioned as a premium option for those requiring the highest performance available. Puget Systems concludes that if you are looking for the most powerful consumer GPU ever created, this is the model to choose.