Ray Tracing Overall Average FPS
As we look at the averages for ray tracing, starting with 1080p, we see where the 5090 really shines, as even at this more CPU-intensive resolution, the 5090 was able to come out quite far ahead of the rest of the cards, with the 4090 sitting 16% behind.
Ray Tracing however is a lot more intensive on a GPU and it’s not really surprising that we see this kind of result. Regardless, I still wouldn’t recommend a 5090 for 1080p, even if the ray tracing performance is this good, as you’ll probably be upscaling anyway, and upscaling at 1080p can be pretty dire due to the quality issues.
Moving on to 1440p, and we see the jump in performance between the 4090 and the new 5090 increasing a little, now at 20%. And whilst this is an improvement, and the frame rates are still more than playable, at only 20% more performance, it doesn’t really seem all that worth it for such a high price. Of course if you’re upgrading from anything else then you can expect a minimum increase of 56%, which is a lot more like it, so for 1440p i can see an argument for upgrading, but not if you have a 4090.
Then finally we have 4K, and this is where your money is really going. Once again we do see a performance increase from the 4090 to the 5090, now with the 5090 performing 27% better. Again this is less than I’d hoped for, but with the percentage difference increasing with each resolution it’s actually justifying itself better as we see more demanding scenarios, which is a positive at least. If we look at some other cards and how they compare, then we start to see some even better jumps. With the likes of the 4080 Super being outperformed by 76%, the 3090 Ti by 118% and the 7900 XTX by a whopping 176%. If you’re looking to upgrade from any of those cards to a 5090 then it’s a lot easier to justify, but if you have a 4090 then I would still probably wait, especially if we do end up seeing multi-frame generation brought to the 40 series later on.
