The lid has now been officially lifted on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, and we've also had the chance to benchmark the card and gauge its performance for ourselves. It's an absolute beast of a GPU, and there's nothing to match it from the competition, although you get much more out of it in games that Multi Frame Gen in the new DLSS 4 suite.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the details of the new best graphics card in of raw performance, but it also heavily relies on AI features such as Multi Frame Gen to really pull ahead of the RTX 4090. In this guide, we'll take you through the release date, specs, and price of the new GPU, and we'll also show you how the Founders Edition card looks with its new cooler design.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 release date
The RTX 5090 release date was Thursday, January 30, 2025, when the Nvidia GPU landed on store shelves, although stock is extremely scarce. Nvidia announced the new GPU at CES 2025 on January 6.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 price
The RTX 5090 price is $1,999 at MSRP for the Founders Edition. We expect overclocked graphics cards from third parties to have higher prices. This price is significantly higher than the $1,599 MSRP of the RTX 4090, although the 4090 is rarely found at this price now.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 specs
The RTX 5090 specs include 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM and 21,760 CUDA cores, as well as a huge memory bandwidth of 1,792GB/s.
| RTX 5090 specs | |
| CUDA cores | 21,760 |
| RT cores | 170 (4th-gen) |
| Tensor cores | 680 (5th-gen) |
| Boost clock | 2,407MHz |
| Base clock | 2,017MHz |
| Interface | 16x PCIe 5.0 |
| VRAM | 32GB 28Gbps GDDR7 |
| Memory interface | 512-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 1,792GB/s |
| Total board power | 575W |
| Power connectors | 1 x 16-pin |
With 21,760 CUDA cores, the RTX 5090 is divided into 170 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), which gives it 170 RT cores. As a point of comparison, the GeForce RTX 4090 has 128 SMs, giving it 16,384 CUDA cores, meaning the RTX 5090 has a lot more parallel processing power.
Remarkably, Nvidia has also managed to get the size of the RTX 5090 cooler down to just two slots. There are two fans on the front, and just vents on the back, and between them is the tiny RTX 5090 PCB, as shown in the picture above.
As was widely speculated, the RTX 5090 also uses GDDR7 VRAM attached to a super-wide 512-bit bus, which is much wider than the RTX 4090's already fat 384-bit interface. The result is an enormous 1,792GB/s of memory bandwidth, with the VRAM running at an effective speed of around 28Gbps. This bandwidth is huge compared to the RTX 4090's bandwidth of just over 1TB/s.
Not only that, but the RTX 5090 also comes with a massive 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, giving it plenty of headroom for professional work, as well as gaming at very high resolutions with all the settings maxed out.
There is a potential cost to all this power, though, which is the RTX 5090 needs two 16-pin power cables.
As expected, the GeForce RTX 5090 is also Nvidia's first gaming GPU to use the new 16x PCIe 5.0 interface. You'll still be able to install it in a PCIe 4.0 or even PCIe 3.0 slot, but you won't get the full amount of bandwidth, which is likely to restrict performance on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard. Finally, the RTX 5090 clock speed is 2.41GHz for the boost clock, and 2.01GHz for the base clock.
In the meantime, if you want to buy a new graphics card now, check out our GeForce RTX 4080 Super review, where we benchmark Nvidia's latest high-end GPU. It corrects the big pricing errors Nvidia made with the original RTX 4080, while also offering decent 4K gaming performance for $999.