NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition Review: Still King Of PC Gaming

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Speed Way is the most recent addition to the UL 3DMark graphics test suite. Speed Way uses the DirectX 12 Ultimate API and leverages advanced features like DirectX Ray Tracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and ray traced reflections, Mesh Shaders, and high resolution textures and artwork. All of the graphics cards here were testing using the default benchmark options should you want to compare the performance of your system to our test rig...

UL 3DMark Speed Way DX12 Ultimate Benchmarks

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3DMark Speed Way

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Speedway GeForce RTX 5090 FE Details


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In 3DMark's most advanced graphics test, the GeForce RTX 5090 offers up nearly 42% better performance than the RTX 4090 and more than doubles the performance of AMD's current top-end Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

UL 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 Benchmarks

3DMark Steel Nomad is one of the newer cross-platform GPU benchmarks developed by UL Solutions as part of the 3DMark suite. This test is designed to evaluate the performance of modern gaming hardware in non-ray-traced scenarios, but using otherwise advanced rendering techniques with DX12.

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3DMark Steel Nomad

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Time Spy Extreme GeForce RTX 5090 FE Details

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The new GeForce RTX 5090 outruns is older sibling by roughly 47% in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, and once again more than doubles the performance of AMD's current best Radeon.

VR Benchmarks: VR Mark & Unigine Superposition

Superposition is an aging benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in too. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some excellent visuals. We ran Superposition's VR Future benchmark to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

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Unigine Superposition VR Future Test

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Unigine's VR Future benchmark shows the GeForce RTX 5090 leading the pack yet again, besting the GeForce RTX 4090 by a little less than 30%. Also of note -- the RTX 5090's minimum framerate here is more than 40 FPS higher than the 7900 XTX

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark was designed to test a PC’s readiness for HMDs like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is the most taxing test offered by the tool.

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UL VRMark

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 VRMark GeForce RTX 5090 FE Details

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The framerates are much higher in VRMark versus Unigine's VR Future benchmark, but the deltas don't change much. Once again the GeForce RTX 5090 reigns supreme and outruns the RTX 4090 by about 30%.

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