While most had feared a price increase, the new RTX 5090 will be released at $2,000, or more than €2,200, and will be available for purchase on January 30th. This is made even sadder by the fact that Nvidia’s Founder Edition cards are usually the cheapest option, but also extremely limited, so prices will most likely be close to, and above €2,500 for third party cards.
The card is, as everything lately, crammed with AI and neural based technology, with an explanation on this provided by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, as the following: “Blackwell, the engine of AI, has arrived for PC gamers, developers and creatives. Fusing AI-driven neural rendering and ray tracing, Blackwell is the most significant computer graphics innovation since we introduced programmable shading 25 years ago.”
RTX 5090 features 92 billion transistors, providing over 3,352 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS). Nvidia has, as usual, provided a collection of numbers for us to compare, but as with anything in tech, we will have do verify those numbers independently when possible.
So, what do you get? A lot actually. Nvidia is promising twice the performance from 32GB of VRAM, and you finally get to use your PCIe 5.0 slot as intended. It also uses DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation, instead of making one frame each time, and it can now generate three out of thin air, vastly improving FPS. With transformer-based DLSS Ray Reconstruction (it’s called “transformer model”, and no, no Autobots were harmed in the making) and improved Super Resolution, ghosting has been reduced, anti-aliasing enhanced, and stability improved according to Nvidia. While a massive 75 games are supported at release, DLSS 4 does not seem to be compatible with RTX 40 Series cards or older.
The full specs can be seen in the image below:
It’s also noteworthy that Nvidia seems to be returning to the two-slot format, and while the RTX 5090 has had a massive uplift in pricing, the cheaper cards are hit less by price increases.
In addition, AI is now integrated into the programmable shaders that use the new RTX Neural Shaders system, further giving us film-quality graphics according to Nvidia. A separate system for faces has also been implemented.