Overall and Final Verdict
Nvidia’s design of the RTX 5090 Founders Edition somehow managed to be completely new while looking right at home if you were to put it next to a Founders Edition card from the last few generations. That means you still get the clean black and dark grey styling that is always one of or the best looking card available in my opinion. The lighting accents are subtle, backlighting some of the X design on both the front and back of the card as well as the GeForce RTX branding up on top. I do wish they had included RGB just as a way to customize the card a little and I will always push to see the actual model name used up on the top edge over the generic branding. Being able to show off that you have an RTX 5090 would be cool. I was really happy to see that they finally went with a fully blacked-out PCI bracket, I’ve been pushing for this for years, and not only does it look great but when you have the card installed in a case it will blend in better as well.
They cut the design down in size from a three-slot design to a two-slot design which should help with some SFF designs and help make sure there is room for airflow in builds that want to use multiple cards (compute and AI situations). They did keep the same height and length, so this still isn’t a small card by any means. Once again the build quality is a step above what you might see from some aftermarket designs with an all-metal shroud design that isn’t ever going to sag.
Performance for the new generation of cards in my testing had the RTX 5090 outperforming the RTX 4090 by around 32% which is right in line with the increase in CUDA cores for the card. There were some tests which saw an even bigger increase and the RTX 5090 was at the top of the chart across the board in every applicable test. What was even more impressive to me was the improvements with DLSS 4, the performance difference that it can make is sometimes shocking, but on top of that Nvidia has improved the smoothness and picture quality. At the end of the day, there wasn’t anything that I threw at the RTX 5090 that slowed it down, but if you do run into something that it can’t handle DLSS 4 is going to fix you right up. I did see some bugs in my DLSS testing, mostly when trying down resolutions, but I suspect some of those will be smoothed out once the updates are released. The biggest issue I ran into performance-wise was that a few of our benchmarks just wouldn’t run at all and they were all OpenCL. Nvidia is aware and is working to get support for those tests.
The big increase in performance without any change in manufacturing size does have the RTX 5090 having a significantly higher power consumption. I saw it pulling up to 648 watts at peak, combine that with today's highest-end CPUs and we are swinging back to needing high-wattage power supplies. Speaking of power, the power connection has been improved in a whole list of ways including moving from the original 12VHPWR connection to the changed design that is called 12V-2-6. It looks the same and all of the power supplies will still connect. But they have changed the pin heights to get a better connection and the sense pins are shorter and are more likely to catch when the plug isn’t connected all the way. On top of that Nvidia’s card design has recessed the connection down into the card and angled it to reduce any strain on the connection. They have also included a much nicer power adapter as well. All of that power does mean there is more heat but the double blow-through design handled it surprisingly well running similarly in temperatures to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition even with a thinner card design and a lot more wattage going through.
For pricing, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition has an MSRP of $1999 which isn’t cheap but isn’t entirely out of line with some of Nvidia’s flagship cards at launch. The previous generation RTX 4090 launched at $1599 but before that, the RTX 3090 Ti launched at $1999. That said, I did put together a chart which is up above that graphs out card pricing to 3Dmark Time Spy Extreme scores. I included both launch MSRP pricing as well as current low prices from PCPartPicker. This also gives us a unique look to see what cards maybe weren’t a value when they launched but are now. The RTX 5090 Founders Edition, being a flagship card isn’t going to be a value leader but it is in line with the RTX 4080 and RTX 3080 and is a lot better value than the RTX 4090 and RTX 3090. The $1999 price point is well beyond a price point that I could afford, but if you are looking for the best possible performance this is the only option.
Live Pricing: HERE