Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 GPU has made waves with its powerful performance, but it comes with a higher power consumption.
The RTX 5090 is 27% faster than the RTX 4090, but it also uses 28% more power, with a total TDP of 575W compared to the 450W of the RTX 4090.
However, when both GPUs are limited to the same power usage of 450W, the performance difference shrinks.
According to tests by ComputerBase, the RTX 5090 only achieves 17% more FPS in rasterization tasks, despite having 33% more CUDA cores. This is an 8% drop in performance compared to the RTX 5090’s usual performance when using 125W more power.
The results suggest that while the RTX 5090 is more powerful, it’s not as efficient as expected. The extra power does not result in a proportional performance boost.
The RTX 5090 seems to scale linearly with its increased TDP, offering 27% more performance for 28% more energy, which is not a huge efficiency gain.
In comparison, the RTX 4090 showed a much greater efficiency improvement when compared to the RTX 3090, with a 50% performance boost for only a 29% increase in power.
Overall, while the RTX 5090 offers a performance upgrade, it does so at the cost of efficiency. If power consumption is kept the same, the performance difference between the two cards is less significant than expected.
