Introduction

We have with us the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming OC, the company’s most affordable custom design take on this generation’s flagship gaming GPU. The Gaming OC line of graphics cards by Gigabyte are positioned a notch below the company’s AORUS Gaming series, and target the class of buyers who have their minds set on a particular GPU, and don’t need something swanky. These cards tend to be priced closest to the NVIDIA MSRP, which in case of the RTX 5090, is an eye-watering $2,000. The Gigabyte RTX 5090 Gaming OC is hardly a cheap product in that sense, and even within its price-point, it packs some serious kit, including a massive 4-slot cooling solution that uses a vapor chamber plate, multiple stacked heat pipes, a large aluminium fin-stack array, and a trio of large axial flows that nearly touch each other at their edges. There is a minimal touch of RGB LED lighting in the form of an illuminated logo.

The GeForce RTX 5090 is designed for one thing and one thing only, to be the fastest graphics card money can buy. This dreadnought of a GPU pushes both the GeForce Blackwell graphics architecture, and the NVIDIA 4N process node it’s based on, to the limits. There’s enough performance on tap to max out games at 4K Ultra HD native resolution with ray tracing enabled, and perhaps even high refresh rates. The card also unlocks new use-cases, such as gaming on an 8K display, taking advantage new technologies such as DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation. Besides being a no-holes-barred gaming GPU, the RTX 5090 is also an AI acceleration powerhouse, taking advantage of its latest FP4-capable Tensor cores, a vast array of 170 SM or 21,760 concurrent FP32+INT32 CUDA cores. Perhaps the biggest generational upgrade to its specs sheet is memory. You get 32 GB of the latest 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory across a broad 512-bit wide memory bus, yielding 1.792 TB/s of bandwidth. This is the first graphics card generation to implement PCI-Express 5.0 x16.

The Blackwell graphics architecture introduces a technology as fundamentally new to consumer 3D graphics as raster 3D, programmable shaders, and real time ray tracing; it’s called Neural Rendering. You’ve already seen the awesome power of generative AI in creating photorealistic images and video. NVIDIA figured out a way for the GPU to run a generative AI model and render graphics in tandem, thanks to a new component called AMP (AI management processor). The GPU combines 3D objects created by the generative AI model with raster 3D graphics much in the same way that it combines real-time ray traced objects. The result is a technological leap in photorealism and geometric detail. We were blown away by the tech demos NVIDIA showed us at CES, and we can’t wait to see game developers pick up on the tech. On its part, NVIDIA collaborated with Microsoft to standardize the tech, by making it possible for 3D applications to directly address Tensor cores. The shader execution reordering engine supports neural shaders.

The new 4th Generation RT core has added hardware for Mega Geometry, the ability to give ray traced object exponentially higher poly counts, and for all those added surfaces to accurately interact with rays. Then there’s DLSS 4. NVIDIA replaced the convoluted neural networks (CNN) based AI model powering the various components of DLSS, with a new transformer-based model that is more accurate, and provides higher image quality at every performance preset. This works on even the RTX 40-series Ada and RTX 30-series Ampere generations, what’s exclusive to Blackwell, though, is Multi Frame Generation. NVIDIA created a way for is frame generation AI model to create not just every second frame following a conventionally rendered one, but up to three such AI generated frames, which take into account motion vectors and other relevant information. When combined with super resolution, it takes the rendering power of 1 pixel to create up to 16 pixels. This feature relies on a crucial hardware component found in the display engine of Blackwell, called hardware flip-metering, which is why it’s exclusive to Blackwell.

The RTX 5090 is based on the GB202 silicon, a coaster-sized GPU package with a large monolithic die measuring 750 mm², with 92 billion transistors. The chip package is much larger than anything NVIDIA created in recent times, because in addition to its power pins catering to its total graphics power of 575 W, the chip wires out a 512-bit GDDR7 memory bus. The GB202 physically has 192 SM and 128 MB of L2 cache, the RTX 5090 gets 170 of those SM, and 96 MB of L2 cache.

With the GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming OC, Gigabyte introduces the latest generation of its WindForce 3X cooling solution, and its 100 mm axial flow fans that ventilate two large aluminium fin stacks that pull heat form the GPU and memory via a vapor chamber plate. The card comes with a fairly high factory overclock of 2550 MHz boost compared to 2407 MHz reference. The card offers dual-BIOS, with its Silent BIOS sticking to these speeds at a more tightened fan-curve. Gigabyte is pricing the RTX 5090 Gaming OC at $2,350, a 17.5% premium over the NVIDIA baseline.