RTX 5090 may be NVIDIA's biggest ever gen-on-gen performance uplift, with GPU on track for 2024

The Blackwell flagship graphics card might outdo the huge performance gains seen with the RTX 4090, and it's on track for later this year.

RTX 5090 may be NVIDIA's biggest ever gen-on-gen performance uplift, with GPU on track for 2024
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NVIDIA's Blackwell graphics cards of the GeForce variety are on target for later this year, and are set to offer the "biggest ever" generational performance lift from Team Green, if a new rumor is to be believed.

This comes from AGF on X (formerly Twitter), a leaker who has been quiet for some time, but has just appeared back on the scene.

In a fresh tweet (highlighted by RedGamingTech over on YouTube), AGF claims the gen-on-gen performance boost will be the largest stride forward NVIDIA has ever taken - at least in the contemporary era of GPUs, we assume - mainly because Blackwell was initially designed to go up against a monster RDNA 4 MCM flagship graphics card.

Although of course that's a tack AMD has now abandoned, if the grapevine is correct, with pretty much everyone now believing that RDNA 4 will top out at the mid-range.

Even so, NVIDIA is still going to push hard with RTX 5000 GPUs, AGF believes, because the Blackwell generation is expected to hold the fort against RDNA 5, not just go up against RDNA 4. (With the latter not offering any high-end competition anyway, as noted - but RDNA 5 will, or so we're told, anyway).

What will the mentioned biggest generational leap entail, then? Well, AGF doesn't put any figures to this assertion, not even ballpark percentages - but elsewhere we have heard the possibility that the RTX 5090 might be 70% faster than the RTX 4090. At least that's mentioned as a best-case scenario, we should add as a caveat. (Although the lower-tier Blackwell cards will likely be a very different story, of course).

The RTX 4090 is typically seen as a 60% to 70% leap over the RTX 3090 (though quantifying that precisely depends on a whole lot of variables), so as far as we can tell, the suggestion here is we're getting a 70% uplift, or maybe a touch more even, from the RTX 5090.

On track for 2024

AGF also replies to a query about whether the RTX 5090 is due in 2024, and seems pretty certain the GPU is, and that "it's under qualification right now" apparently with no delay evident. Which echoes what YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead has maintained all along (when other some leakers, such as RedGamingTech, have suggested the possibility of a delay to 2025).

The expectation from the rumor mill is that the RTX 5090 will land late in the year, possibly in Q4 (or maybe it could sneak out in Q3). It'll be the only consumer Blackwell graphics card to launch this year, with the RTX 5080 and company will follow in 2025 (as well as laptop GPUs, of course).

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, and if the RTX 5090 is indeed a vast improvement on the RTX 4090, how much NVIDIA will charge for it. Wallet-destroying price tags have already been floated via the rumor mill, as you might expect.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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