Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 vs RTX 4090: 5 biggest differences

Nvidia’s RTX 5090 is easily the best gaming experience I’ve ever witnessed — both in general and at CES 2025. But it’s easy to get whipped up in incredible graphical fidelity without asking one question: What is actually different from the last generation RTX 4090?

Turns out there are a lot of differences, and it can be easy to get lost in all the numbers of CUDA cores and memory bandwidth. So with hands-on experience with these GPUs, let me tell you about what the key differences are.

The price is going up

The RTX 4090 started at $1,599 — I only say “started” because there was a high likelihood that the actual price you paid ballooned given the demand for this beast.

Well, the 5090 is going one step further with a cost of $1,999. To clarify, this is for the Founders Edition GPU only, so be wary that as other companies like Asus and MSI bolt on a ton more cooling techniques and RGB the cost may go even higher.

Dramatic spec bumps

There are plenty of spec differences, but the biggest changes to the Blackwell architecture come in the huge bumps in AI performance potential, the ability to multitask way more graphics tasks and perform unseen levels of ray tracing.

• 680 5th Gen Tensor Cores help make DLSS 4 absolutely sing — up from 512
• New Streaming Multiprocessors (not present on RTX 4090) are optimized for all kinds of AI-driven graphical tasks like RTX skin and Neural Shaders for vastly more realistic character skins and texture detailing
• 170 4th Gen Ray Tracing Cores to support RTX Mega Geometry, 33% more than on the RTX 4090

Top it all off with the thermal management capability to run at a blistering 575 watts over the 450 W of the RTX 4090, and while this could be a problem for your electric bill, it will deliver the absolute best gaming experience.

Framerate leaps

Taking a look at the table up above, it’s admirable that Nvidia is bringing a good amount of its enhanced AI-driven DLSS features to older graphics cards. But make no mistake about it, you’re getting the ultimate experience on 5090 alongside the RTX neural features too.

The multi-frame generation here means that not only can the trained AI running on your GPU predict the next frame, it can predict the next 3. This drastically improves framerate over RTX 4090, but it’s not the only improvement.

This is not possible on the RTX 4090, and the end result is massive gains in frames per second by up to 2X.

Betting big on AI

In the RTX 5090, you’re getting new Neural Rendering features too — things that use an on-board AI trained with the game itself to boost fidelity and detail. Behind the scenes of any game, there’s a neural network running away to push a few key things.

• RTX Neural Shaders reduce the size of in-game textures by 7x, which reduces its demand on the video memory on the GPU and allows for more of that memory to be used elsewhere.
• RTX Neural Faces takes data trained on in-game character faces and makes a real-time generative AI model that can work to make more natural facial expressions.

And on top of that, responsiveness has been drastically improved too with Nvidia Reflex 2. By putting some horsepower towards synchronizing the GPU and CPU rendering of a game, Nvidia is able to drastically reduce the latency of all of this AI work. In my time playing with the RTX 5090, I felt literally zero latency between my inputs and what happens on screen.

Huge VRAM gains

One thing that has become abundantly clear whenever you look at the recommended specs of the latest PC games is that the amount of video memory required to save critical graphics instructions for demanding titles is getting higher. There’s a lot to render, and keeping these visual cues in the background ready to show up at a moment’s notice is important to how gorgeous these games look.

Not only does the VRAM jump up from 24GB to 32GB in the RTX 5090, but it gets a lot faster too with GDDR7 memory. You’re getting both more of it and a faster speed at 32 Gbps.

Outlook

So it should come as absolutely no surprise that the newer graphics card is better than the older one. That’s the nature of this industry we’re in. But the gains we’re seeing are not so natural.

Double the framerate, vastly improved fidelity and support for the new wave of 4K OLED 240Hz monitors means a new standard in gaming has been reached. Nvidia has put all of its chips on AI driving this industry forward, and with the RTX 5090 giving you neural nets that are capable of crazy detail with unnoticeable latency, I’m inclined to agree with them.

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Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom’s Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom’s Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you’ll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn’t already.