The most powerful graphics card you can buy right now is actually pretty worthless if you don’t have the right PC gaming setup. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 is at its best when paired with a 4K monitor that can reach high refresh rates, like 144 Hz or 240 Hz. Anything less than that diminishes the value of an already ridiculously expensive card.
A graphics card as beefy as the RTX 5090 needs to chew on the toughest games to justify its $1,999 price tag. I’m talking about Alan Wake 2 with everything set to max, or Cyberpunk 2077 with all the ray tracing on. It’s a card for people who don’t mind paying to not have to fiddle with graphics settings. Chances are, you already know if that’s you or not.
The RTX 5090 didn’t transform my experience with games — it mostly saved me time. I’ve been using a card sent to me for review by Nvidia, and over the last month I haven’t had to think about frame rate. Even a game as unstable as Monster Hunter Wilds ran almost flawlessly on my PC — which is equipped with an Intel Core i9-12900K 5.2 GHz 16-core processor, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1000 W power supply. I’m also running everything on an 4K 32-inch MSI OLED monitor. All the reports of stuttering and abysmal frame rates didn’t affect me. And that’s really the whole reason you’d buy the most expensive graphics card in the world right now: to boot up any game and know it’ll have enough overhead to run just fine.
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisfot via Polygon
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
That doesn’t mean I’d recommend it, though. Even if it were possible to find one in stock, the RTX 5090 isn’t worth it for almost anyone in need of an upgrade or looking to build a gaming PC. There are far more reasonable options out there, particularly in Nvidia’s previous generations of cards.
That’s largely because you don’t actually need an RTX 5090 to benefit from several of its best features. The 40-series cards can use both DLSS 4 and Frame Generation, which leaves the RTX 5090’s primary advantages in Multi Frame Generation and raw horsepower. In other words: The RTX 5090 is mostly a peek at what future hardware iterations could be capable of at more reasonable prices. It’s proof that Nvidia’s AI-powered upscaling technologies, DLSS and Frame Generation, can get even better than they already were. Both of them really do feel like magic when they work, and they’re only becoming more important as it gets harder and harder to afford the latest hardware.
For example: I cranked up every single setting in Cyberpunk 2077 as high as it would go. My frame rate chugged as the RTX 5090 churned out scenes with real-time reflections in the puddles and cars whizzing by. But unless I wanted to spend hours people-watching in Night City, the game was unplayably slow. With DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation on, however, it went from a choppy mess in motion to a slightly sluggish but playable game that was hitting upward of 120 frames per second. I could run through the busy market full of NPCs and neon signage without a hitch. If I was willing to put up with a slight delay between my button presses and the actions on screen — similar to how it feels to stream a game over the cloud — Cyberpunk 2077 was playable at a high frame rate on settings that were mostly a novelty in the past.
It still wasn’t smooth enough to justify relatively minor improvements in the lighting over less absurd graphics settings. The more you rely on Multi Frame Generation to insert AI-created frames, the more input lag is introduced, meaning your button presses will have a noticeable delay. In situations where you need to drastically increase the frame rate to make the game visually playable, you’ll have to sacrifice responsiveness. And it hurts a fast-paced first-person shooter like Cyberpunk 2077 the most. It was certainly impressive seeing the game run well above 60 frames per second on a high-refresh-rate monitor. Normally, that would require a lot of graphical sacrifices to pull off. But just because it was playable doesn’t mean it was tolerable. It’s a feature much better suited for when you’re not aiming for super-high frame rates, which is why I see no reason to invest in an RTX 5090 and an expensive monitor for it. And remember: Nvidia’s other 50-series cards can use Multi Frame Generation too, so the high frame rate life doesn’t require the top-of-the-line GPU.
DLSS 4 is a similar story. This version of the upscaling tech uses a new AI model that basically makes details on objects look a little less blurry, especially in motion. On my 4K monitor, I had to stop and squint in Alan Wake 2 and Marvel Rivals to really notice a difference. Things like raindrops sliding down a window or blades of grass had slightly sharper details in DLSS 4 over DLSS 3, but my frame rates were about the same. These are the kinds of improvements worth waiting 10 minutes to download new drivers that enable it on your 40-series card, rather than spending thousands of dollars on an RTX 5090.
Image: Capcom
The only tiny caveat to that is Ray Reconstruction, a high-end feature for games with the fanciest ray tracing, which is also known as path tracing. Path tracing makes even the RTX 5090 sweat from all the calculations it has to do to accurately track how light bounces around a scene. Lesser cards can barely handle it. It’s the kind of thing you turn on, admire for 30 seconds, and turn off again to reclaim the chunk of frames it eats up. Ray Reconstruction uses AI-powered denoisers to make the job significantly easier, which causes it to take a much smaller bite out of your frame rate. While you can definitely see and feel the difference in games like Cyberpunk 2077 — headlights cast sharper cones of light on the road as you drive — it feels like the first step in making path tracing less of a luxury feature.
DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation overshadow a lot of the raw power of the RTX 5090. Everything from Diablo 4 to Assassin’s Creed Shadows ran exceptionally well on it, easily hitting over 60 fps. That was the same case in Alan Wake 2 and Marvel Rivals. Both games gained about 20 to 30 fps over my RTX 4090, and were able to sit comfortably at 60 fps even during intense action. The slight increases weren’t particularly noticeable without staring at the fps counter, though. In practice, all it really meant was that there were fewer times where the frame rate would dip low enough for me to notice it. That kind of overhead is nice to have, especially when you’re trying to hit solid fps at 4K, but it’s not enough to justify hunting an RTX 5090 down and shelling out the money for it, especially when anyone with an RTX 4090 or an RTX 5080 will be able to take advantage of DLSS and regular Frame Generation already.
The RTX 5090 is the most powerful GPU right now, but it’s also the most niche GPU right now. It’s not a substantial upgrade from the RTX 4090, nor is it the most cost-effective upgrade for those who have an RTX 30-series or older card. It’s a high-end GPU for people who don’t need a review to tell them whether it’s worth it or not. For everyone else, it’s really just a concept for where graphics tech is headed. Eventually, a much cheaper card with these features will come around. You’re better off acting like it doesn’t exist while you take advantage of all the software improvements Nvidia made along with it.
