Nvidia RTX 5090 vs. RTX 4090 & RTX 5080: Performance, Power, and Gaming Benchmarks Explained

Synthetic Benchmarks and Rendering Performance compare RTX 5090, RTX 4090, and RTX 5080 across 3DMark, Blender, and V-Ray workloads under testing.

Hardware by Vecna on Jan 23, 2026

Everyone knows which graphics card leads in gaming performance, but the many discussions and comments on different reviews show that fans want more information.

Now that the RTX 5090 is available, let's see whether it meets expectations and how it stacks up against older top-tier GPUs. Compared to the RTX 4090, this new top model comes with a significant price increase, raising questions about how much it's really worth and how much better it performs.

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Power Consumption and Thermals

All the tested cards managed light tasks, such as playing 4K videos, well. However, the RTX 5090 sometimes turned on its fans even when the load was very light. Stress testing showed that the RTX 5080 in the ASUS ROG Astral OC used about 40W more than normal.

This gave a small performance increase, but it also created significant noise from its four fans running at 2500rpm. The RTX 4090 ROG Strix was somewhat loud, while the Palit GameRock RTX 5090 stayed at a reasonable noise level.

Heavy workloads also brought attention to a key issue: the 12VHPWR power connector. Stock configurations using 575W caused the outside temperature around the connector to reach 80–90°C. Increasing the power draw raised temperatures even further, demonstrating that even large cooling systems can't fully mitigate heat stress at very high power levels.

Synthetic Benchmarks

In 3DMark, the RTX 5090 was 30–38% better than the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5080 was about 1.5 times slower, even though it had only half the cores. Blender rendered scenes much quicker on the RTX 5090, while the RTX 5080 took 83% longer, and the RTX 4090 was a third slower.

V-Ray tests showed that the RTX 4090 and RTX 5080 have similar performance, but in RTX tasks, the RTX 5090 was still 28% faster than the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5080 was 38% slower.

Tests of LM-Studio using smaller models found that the RTX 4090 and RTX 5080 performed similarly, while the RTX 5090 was 43–45% faster.

With larger models that use more than 24GB of VRAM, the RTX 5090 performed nearly 20 times better than the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5080 was more than 30 times slower. By transferring some tasks to the CPU, this gap was reduced to 4–6 times in the best cases.

ComfyUI results, shown in seconds per token, preferred the RTX 5090, which created video from images 31% quicker than the RTX 4090, and much faster than the RTX 5080. Long video clips showed why some experts choose RTX 4090 models with 48GB of VRAM over the regular 32GB RTX 5090.

Gaming Performance at 4K and 1440p

The RTX 5090 performs very well in most current games, even at high resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077, without DLSS, using a Ryzen 9 9950X3D showed almost perfect GPU utilization, but the CPU sometimes reached its limits. At 4K, the RTX 5090 only lost 46% of fps during intense scenes, while the RTX 4090 and RTX 5080 lost about 56%. This gives the new flagship a lead of 60–63%.

In Marvel's Spider-Man 2 at UltraHD, the RTX 4090 performed 16% better than the RTX 4080, but was still 13% behind the RTX 5090. Alan Wake 2 showed a 22% performance difference between the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090, while the RTX 5080 was a bit closer at 27% behind.

Assassin's Creed Shadows vs Dying Light: The Beast showed small performance improvements. This shows that just having faster memory doesn't always lead to big increases in fps.

Borderlands4 was tested with DLSS upscaling, showing only an 8% improvement in performance at native resolutions. At 4K, upscaling increased the RTX 5090's performance significantly compared to previous models, while the RTX 5080 was still 24% slower than the RTX 4090.

In 12 games at 1440p without ray tracing, the RTX 5090 was 19% quicker than the RTX 4090 and 35% faster than the RTX 5080. At 4K, the RTX 5090 was 27% faster than the RTX 4090 on average, while the RTX 5080 was 48% slower.

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Ray Tracing Performance

Ray tracing shows a common situation: the RTX 5090 still experiences significant fps drops, like its older models, but it performs better than those older cards. In Doom: The Dark Ages with path tracing, all GPUs experienced significant performance drops.

However, the RTX 5090 was 33% better than the RTX 4090 and 56% better than the RTX5080. With path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, the RTX 5080's fps dropped by 69%. The RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 both dropped by 63%. Spider-Man 2 showed that the RTX 4090 was 23% faster than the RTX 5080 and the RTX 5090 was 19% faster than the RTX 5080. The RTX 5080 had a hard time keeping up with Alan Wake 2 and Assassin's Creed Shadows, which had similar patterns.

DLSS4 Multi-Frame Generation

The RTX 5090 excels in DLSS4 multi-frame creation, particularly on high-refresh displays. When the real fps decreases by about 20%, people feel that smoothness increases by more than 3 times, allowing 4K240hz displays to perform at their best.

However, the input lag is still similar to 50 fps without generation, which means this technology is only useful in certain situations and not always helpful.

Overclocking and Undervolting

Standard overclocking provided small improvements, around 5% in most games. Using an 800W BIOS resulted in up to a 14% boost in extreme benchmarks, but it needed much more power and created a lot of noise. Undervolting made the GPU temperatures go down a little and slowed down the fans.

Still, it only helped when power was limited, like when doing a lot of ray tracing. To keep things safe and stable, extreme overclocking needs advanced cooling methods like water blocks or chillers.

Specifications Overview

The RTX 5090 has about one-third more cores and processing blocks than the RTX 4090, while the number of ROPs stays the same. Power limits increased by 125W, and L2 cache and VRAM grew by about a third. The memory is GDDR7 and connects using PCIe 5.0.

The RTX 5090 is almost twice as expensive as the RTX5080 and has almost twice as many cores, with 57% more ROPs. The RTX 5080 has a power limit that is 225W lower, a 1.5x smaller L2 cache, half the VRAM, and a narrower bus. However, it does have a slightly higher memory frequency.

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Final Thoughts

Like many top-tier GPUs, the RTX 5090 may not be the best option for average gamers. It is about 1.5 times faster than the RTX 5080, but it costs almost twice as much, and sometimes even more, in stores.

Improvements from one generation to the next are small, and regular overclocking does not significantly boost performance. In tasks that require a lot of memory, such as neural networks or professional programs, the performance differences can become very significant. This makes the RTX 5090 very appealing for these specific uses.

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