$2500 5090 I’m out

There's nothing about the 5080 tha

I doubt we will see 40% gains without DLSS magic and that kills the deal for me. There's no game currently out or on the horizon that I need to play so badly with increased FPS that I will just spend 1k for an extra 15-20 fps. Sorry......just not happening!

EXCELLENT point. The games. Where are the cool jaw dropping next gen game engine games? Every game I play on my current gaming rig which has a 13900K CPU, 32GB DDR5, 2GB NVMe M.2, and RTX-4080 all play games at Ultra settings maxed and I get super fast frames and smooth gameplay. I play @ 3400 X 1440 res on my OLED Ultrawide. I have never seen a game chug or bog down due to my computer not handling it yet.

At this point a 5090 would be total overkill and pretty much an unnoticeable upgrade for me, unless some super duper new game engine comes out that is very demanding, maybe the upcoming Battlefield 6 this Fall, or maybe Doom Dark Ages, but I'm not upgrading just for one or two new games.

I still play World of Warcraft the most. The game does look great at Ultra settings with 8xAA and beautiful colors in OLED getting 150 to 200fps mostly, except in the main faction cities it can get down to the 60 to 80 fps but I think that's more due to traffic and network not the game engine or my system?

At this point the only computer upgrade I'm really thinking about is that new 5k2k OLED 45" Ultrawide monitor. The 5090 is just kinda of tempting to me now, sort of, but again it's need to be like 75% to 100% faster performance than my current RTX-4080, if I'm going to drop $2,000+ dollars on a video card it better be a super massive performance upgrade. But if only 30% better? LOL I don't smoke crack.
 
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EXCELLENT point. The games. Where are the cool jaw dropping next gen game engine games? Every game I play on my current gaming rig which has a 13900K CPU, 32GB DDR5, 2GB NVMe M.2, and RTX-4080 all play games at Ultra settings maxed and I get super fast frames and smooth gameplay. I play @ 3400 X 1440 res on my OLED Ultrawide. I have never seen a game chug or bog down due to my computer not handling it yet.

At this point a 5090 would be total overkill and pretty much an unnoticeable upgrade for me, unless some super duper new game engine comes out that is very demanding, maybe the upcoming Battlefield 6 this Fall, or maybe Doom Dark Ages, but I'm not upgrading just for one or two new games.

I still play World of Warcraft the most. The game does look great at Ultra settings with 8xAA and beautiful colors in OLED getting 150 to 200fps mostly, except in the main faction cities it can get down to the 60 to 80 fps but I think that's more due to traffic and network not the game engine or my system?

At this point the only computer upgrade I'm really thinking about is that new 5k2k OLED 45" Ultrawide monitor. The 5090 is just kinda of tempinting to me now, sort of, but again it's need to be like 75% to 100% faster performance than my current RTX-4080.
I have been playing Stalker2 and get about 100fps at 3840x2160, I do use DLSS quality and most everything on Epic, except shadows are on High, but who cares I don't look at them anyhow. The graphics look incredible in the game!
I put that aside though because it will get DLSS4 by the end of the month, and I want to see how it does with the 4080. So now I decided to get Return to Castle Wolfenstein going and play that, one of the best shooters ever, and the good part is I don't need a 5080 to play it.
 
I have been playing Stalker2 and get about 100fps at 3840x2160, I do use DLSS quality and most everything on Epic, except shadows are on High, but who cares I don't look at them anyhow. The graphics look incredible in the game!
I put that aside though because it will get DLSS4 by the end of the month, and I want to see how it does with the 4080. So now I decided to get Return to Castle Wolfenstein going and play that, one of the best shooters ever, and the good part is I don't need a 5080 to play it.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein from 2001?

I love old Id shooter games, I recently played Quake 1 and 2 remaster last year and LOVED them. Now playing the "boomer shooter" Boltgun and it's better than most triple A game releases.
 
EXCELLENT point. The games. Where are the cool jaw dropping next gen game engine games? Every game I play on my current gaming rig which has a 13900K CPU, 32GB DDR5, 2GB NVMe M.2, and RTX-4080 all play games at Ultra settings maxed and I get super fast frames and smooth gameplay. I play @ 3400 X 1440 res on my OLED Ultrawide. I have never seen a game chug or bog down due to my computer not handling it yet.

At this point a 5090 would be total overkill and pretty much an unnoticeable upgrade for me, unless some super duper new game engine comes out that is very demanding, maybe the upcoming Battlefield 6 this Fall, or maybe Doom Dark Ages, but I'm not upgrading just for one or two new games.

I still play World of Warcraft the most. The game does look great at Ultra settings with 8xAA and beautiful colors in OLED getting 150 to 200fps mostly, except in the main faction cities it can get down to the 60 to 80 fps but I think that's more due to traffic and network not the game engine or my system?

At this point the only computer upgrade I'm really thinking about is that new 5k2k OLED 45" Ultrawide monitor. The 5090 is just kinda of tempinting to me now, sort of, but again it's need to be like 75% to 100% faster performance than my current RTX-4080.
Yeah, even if I had $2k to spare on a graphics card, the only new game I play is Palworld with my kids, and even my son's rig at 1080P with a GTX 1080 8GB runs it fine. I am waiting on Dune Awakening to play with my brother and friend, but a MMO isn't going to have crazy GPU requirements if they want to be successful.
 
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Many can scale very high in graphics quality while having settings to still run on potatoes. Dunr awakening is one of them.
They haven't revealed the system requirements and recommendations, yet. Most likely it will be similar to Conan Exiles, and even with scaling, you won't see anything in detail worth scaling for. I played Conan Exiles on Xbox S, PC with a 3930K and GTX 1080Ti, 13600K and RTX 3070, and RTX 13600K ans RTX 3080. Nothing stood out to make me go, wow.
 
The only huge gains for this gen are in the AI side of things. Everything else you can guesstimate based on the clock speed and CUDA count. I believe the 5090 has around 30% more CUDA cores but a lower clock speed than the 4090. Most cards only have 2-4 more RTX units as well but they are a newer generation so should preform a bit better.

However they started listing the AI performance this gen and it is 2-3x higher than the last gen, so that is where all the money went this round. They are trying salvage gaming performance numbers by using AI generated frames.
30-35% though still speculation, but still seems odd to consider it "only" 30% when factoring what was typical for past gens.

But seeing this only through a gaming lens may overlook what has professional markets salivating: the big boost in the memory department, a magic metric for AI/LLM stuff in particular. When I OC memory on a 4090, local LLM's (OpenLLaMa) and certain CUDA apps like AI video upscaling will see performance improve linearly with more memspeed.

33% more VRAM, clocked 33% higher, for a net +78% in raw bandwidth. That's significant. L2 cache size is still TBD but may impact this further. $1999 is a lot of money if 5090 is used as a toy, but it's white-hot for compute, AI, professional applications.

Screenshot_20250110_143723_Brave.jpg
 
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Prices alone help some make a decision. You should be happy, less of us that want one will make it easier for you to buy one.
My gut reaction was, buy one, but realistically i am waiting for reviews. The 2k price is doable and 32gb gives me a lot of options. The design sort of has me flabbergasted and I definitely want to see what AIBs are offering.
 
They haven't revealed the system requirements and recommendations, yet. Most likely it will be similar to Conan Exiles, and even with scaling, you won't see anything in detail worth scaling for. I played Conan Exiles on Xbox S, PC with a 3930K and GTX 1080Ti, 13600K and RTX 3070, and RTX 13600K ans RTX 3080. Nothing stood out to make me go, wow.
There's an ongoing closed beta test. Use your imagination :).
 
30-35% though still speculation, but still seems odd to call it "only 30%" when factoring what was typical for past gens. 1080Ti probably ruined us forever.

But seeing this only through a gaming lens may overlook what has professional markets salivating: the big boost in the memory department, a magic metric for AI/LLM stuff in particular. When I OC memory on a 4090, local LLM's (OpenLLaMa) and certain CUDA apps like AI video upscaling will see performance improve linearly with more memspeed.

33% more VRAM, clocked 33% higher, for a net +78% in raw bandwidth. That's significant. L2 cache size is still TBD but may impact this further. $1999 is a lot of money if 5090 is used as a toy, but it's white-hot for compute, AI, professional applications.

View attachment 703124
That 575W TDP is what kind of has me thinking to wait and see. That's pushing the limit of the connector itself over the 4090.
 
30-35% though still speculation, but still seems odd to call it "only 30%" when factoring what was typical for past gens. 1080Ti probably ruined us forever.

But seeing this only through a gaming lens may overlook what has professional markets salivating: the big boost in the memory department, a magic metric for AI/LLM stuff in particular. When I OC memory on a 4090, local LLM's (OpenLLaMa) and certain CUDA apps like AI video upscaling will see performance improve linearly with more memspeed.

33% more VRAM, clocked 33% higher, for a net +78% in raw bandwidth. That's significant. L2 cache size is still TBD but may impact this further. $1999 is a lot of money if 5090 is used as a toy, but it's white-hot for compute, AI, professional applications.

View attachment 703124
I guess I phrased it as ‘only’ 30% because that is less impressive when they increase the price 25%. For people that dabble in AI the card will be amazing but for gamers it is less so. I can’t blame Nvidia for focusing on AI first and I expect them to do that going forward but I can’t justify upgrading my 4090 based on the numbers we have seen so far.

Reviews might change this, but the FarCry 6 RT benchmark is the only non-DLSS benchmark they shared has around a 30% gain if you count the pixels. We will have to wait and see what pure raster performance looks like with no RT applied.
 
That local offer for my 4080s backed out, likely for the best. Probably a great fps/$ at my cac of $780 ish, for a while, considering a 5080 will be $1100 with tax here, even if I snipe one or two.
 
I guess I phrased it as ‘only’ 30% because that is less impressive when they increase the price 25%. For people that dabble in AI the card will be amazing but for gamers it is less so. I can’t blame Nvidia for focusing on AI first and I expect them to do that going forward but I can’t justify upgrading my 4090 based on the numbers we have seen so far.

Makes sense. And the only-30% was more pointed at what's frequently mentioned in these discussions. I understand why though.

How it shakes out for everyone's use case can vary, and uplift may be more pronounced in certain apps. When I moved 3090 to 4090, it was dramatic to the point of WTF (and re-testing multiple times due to disbelief) because in my VR apps the framerates were nearly 2x and frametimes were nearly cut in half, after specs on paper had lowered my expectations. I then tested Cyberpunk to make sure I wasn't hallucinating and those benches were in line with online reviews.

Point being that comparing individual GPU specs between gens in isolation may be misleading. I'm not assuming or expecting 4090 -> 5090 will be another "WTF" moment with my specific apps, but easily worth the $400 price increase especially since 4090 will continue to hold its value.
 
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The 3090 to 4090 for $1500 was justified, for that price you were getting a massive performance upgrade, almost 70%.

But to pay $2,000+ whooping dollars for just 25% to 30% is absolutely ridiculous, and braindead stupid. Unless your a billionaire like Phony Stark and 2 grand is just sitting in your sock drawer as if it's pennies for normal folks LOL.

But again need wait for real reviews and benchmarks to truly see the performance "upgrade". And not with DLSS or AI gimmicks, just raw performance in games at ultra game settings.

To me a video card is just for gaming that's it. What else could I possibly do with a video card besides game on it?

AI work? I don't even know what that means. Or do people use these for like computer animation if you' work for Pixar or Disney as an artist or something?
 
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The 3090 to 4090 for $1500 was justified, for that price you were getting a massive performance upgrade, almost 70%.

But to pay $2,000+ whooping dollars for just 25% to 30% is absolutely ridiculous, and braindead stupid. Unless your a billionaire like Phony Stark and 2 grand is just sitting in your sock drawer as if it's pennies for normal folks LOL.

But again need wait for real reviews and benchmarks to truly see the performance "upgrade". And not with DLSS or AI gimmicks, just raw performance in games at ultra game settings.

To me a video card is just for gaming that's it. What else could I possibly do with a video card besides game on it?

AI work? I don't even know what that means. Or do people use these for like computer animation if you' work for Pixar or Disney as an artist or something?
$2000 is if you can get a FE card, and that doesn't even include tax, here is MA it would be about another $125. If you get a AIB card you may pay around $2500 or more, with MA tax it would be about $156, so $2656 to play video games? Never in 30 years did I dream that a PC component would be so ridiculously expensive, even buying a 5080 is just nuts.
 
$2000 is if you can get a FE card, and that doesn't even include tax, here is MA it would be about another $125. If you get a AIB card you may pay around $2500 or more, with MA tax it would be about $156, so $2656 to play video games? Never in 30 years did I dream that a PC component would be so ridiculously expensive, even buying a 5080 is just nuts.

100% agree, it's beyond insanity.

Here in Chicago, the FE card with tax would be $2200 and the AIB will run like $2700 out the door.

Sorry, not sorry but that's just beyond stupid crazy high price for just one single PC component to just play games at ultra settings. If this trend continues, PC Gaming will become niche product for millionaires only and will die off in a decade and consoles will become the only player in town.

For $2200 - $2700 you can buy just one single video card OR a brand new PlayStation 5 gaming console AND a 65" OLED 4k TV AND nice 5.1 surround sound speaker setup.
 
For $2200 - $2700 you can buy just one single video card OR a brand new PlayStation 5 gaming console AND a 65" OLED 4k TV AND nice 5.1 surround sound speaker setup.
Building an expensive PC just for gaming has always seemed crazy to me. Now if you need an expensive PC and you can game on it, great.
 
PC Gaming will become niche product for millionaires only
This feel like some mental blockage coming from people that feel bad if they do not buy and play with the highest GPU that exist ?

Why would someone buying a 9070xt care a lot what rich people buy to play their game, as long PC games run well (they do) on what he bought.

In your example you can also get a 6800 and do the same, Ferraris did not made car niche, 90 inch OLED tv did not make large flat tv niche, $1600 iPhone pro did not made smarthphone niche.
For that type of card to have an negative impact (game are made for them in mind and do not run well on lower hardware) could only happen if they become the most popular model among game buyer and by definition popular.
 
100% agree, it's beyond insanity.

Here in Chicago, the FE card with tax would be $2200 and the AIB will run like $2700 out the door.

Sorry, not sorry but that's just beyond stupid crazy high price for just one single PC component to just play games at ultra settings. If this trend continues, PC Gaming will become niche product for millionaires only and will die off in a decade and consoles will become the only player in town.

For $2200 - $2700 you can buy just one single video card OR a brand new PlayStation 5 gaming console AND a 65" OLED 4k TV AND nice 5.1 surround sound speaker setup.
Yet, you will soon draw the wrath and fire of all the H.A.R.D.O.C.P. ers that somehow justify this new pricing model, and how your gamer card needs to be revoked because you have the gall to question these "enthusiasts". :)

There are some longtime members here who seem to simply play games 24/7 based on what I've seen in the years I've been on this forum, and for those guys I guess a 2k video card can make sense, but for the average gamer spending 2k on a video card is beyond my ability to understand.
 
Because before the highest-end GPU wasn't so expensive, they were 30% cheaper, but even more important at least for $1500 a new video card guaranteed a massive performance increase of around 60% to 70% faster.

But now we need to pay even higher prices and get less of a performance "upgrade"

So in 2023 you paid $1499 and got 60% to 70% of a performance upgrade.

But in 2025 you pay $2000+ and get a 30% "upgrade"

Not cool the way this is trending.
 
Because before the highest-end GPU wasn't so expensive, they were 30% cheaper, but when note important at least for $1500 a new video card guaranteed a massive performance increase of around 60% to 70% faster.

But now we need to pay even higher prices and get less of a performance "upgrade"
No, you only need to if you have paralyzing FOMO.
 
No, you only need to if you have paralyzing FOMO.

Read what I posted;

"So in 2023 you paid $1499 and got 60% to 70% of a performance upgrade.

But in 2025 you pay $2000+ and get a 30% "upgrade"

Not cool the way this is trending."


So your ok paying a higher price and get less of a performance upgrade? I'm not.
 
Read what I posted;

"So in 2023 you paid $1499 and got 60% to 70% of a performance upgrade.

But in 2025 you pay $2000+ and get a 30% "upgrade"

Not cool the way this is trending."


So your ok paying a higher price and get less of a performance upgrade? I'm not.

It seems invetiable that we will get smaller and smaller performance increases from hardware improvements for a higher and higher price. Moores law can't go on forever. Improvements to software (read DLSS) will eventually be where the improvements come from. Certainly this will happen within our lifetimes.
 
It seems invetiable that we will get smaller and smaller performance increases from hardware improvements for a higher and higher price. Moores law can't go on forever. Improvements to software (read DLSS) will eventually be where the improvements come from. Certainly this will happen within our lifetimes.

Sadly, your probably correct.

Off topic, but how and why have CPU's not changed in price for like forever. They've actually come down in price.

20 years ago the top of the line processors were like $999, today they've almost the same price or cheaper. The 9800X3D is under $500 and a billion times better than a CPU from like 2005 era.
 
100% agree, it's beyond insanity.

Here in Chicago, the FE card with tax would be $2200 and the AIB will run like $2700 out the door.

Sorry, not sorry but that's just beyond stupid crazy high price for just one single PC component to just play games at ultra settings. If this trend continues, PC Gaming will become niche product for millionaires only and will die off in a decade and consoles will become the only player in town.

For $2200 - $2700 you can buy just one single video card OR a brand new PlayStation 5 gaming console AND a 65" OLED 4k TV AND nice 5.1 surround sound speaker setup.
The popping of the AI bubble will bring things back to sanity if there's no new crypto-rush or whatever to replace it, but this situation is ultimately caused by lack of competition in the fab industry. TSMC is so far ahead of everyone else that they're effectively a monopoly, and they've smartly chosen to plan their fab capacity conservatively so they don't get stuck holding the bag of poo if there's a major downturn. Ordinarily, NVIDIA has no reason not to make and sell as many gaming GPU's as they can, even if they're not the most profitable segment. But if they have a limited fab allocation, that's when gamers get left out in the cold.
 
The 5090 has 32gb of gddr7 and 92,000 million transistors, fe is 2000 retail.
The 4090 has 24gb of gddr6 and 76,300 million transistors. fe is 1600 retail.

So thats a 20.6% increase in transistor count and 33.3% increase in ram capacity. I am waiting for offical reviewers to give the performance increase to get a real sense of that. Price increase is 25%.

Here's the thing, you have approximately the same density of transistors and you're getting a much bigger die area and more memory and faster memory. I don't know what Nvidia could have done differently to make this crowd happy with the price increase. I don't see price gouging here as it seems a fair price increase over the 4090.

Just my .02...
 
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Off topic, but how and why have CPU's not changed in price for like forever. They've actually come down in price.
chiplets

My rough understanding of silicon economics is that you make a big wafer with a LOT of chips on it. There is going to be errors in the wafer spread through the whole chunk of silicon. If you make a lot of small chips, then the defect will only impact that small chip. If you make a big chip and that defect ruins that whole section then that is going to get expensive.

Once you put CPUs on chiplets you make them smaller as a lot of the IO parts can be made on a diffeent process, etc...

Net effect is to bring down the cost of the CPU. How well that works on a GPU? GPUs are very very very....i mean very data hungry. Thus one big chip will lower latency and increase bandwidth. It is part of the reason the blackwell server cpu took and bridged two chips into one bigger one.
 
It seems invetiable that we will get smaller and smaller performance increases from hardware improvements for a higher and higher price. Moores law can't go on forever. Improvements to software (read DLSS) will eventually be where the improvements come from. Certainly this will happen within our lifetimes.
I'm not so sure. Look at the gen-over-gen performance increases on M-series Macs since 2020. In the 2010's, we all thought Moore's Law had hit a brick wall in the CPU space, but it turned out that Intel was just shitting the bed from management incompetence and AMD was still down for the count. I expect to see a return-to-normalcy in price and performance at some point, I just can't predict when.
 
I'm not so sure. Look at the gen-over-gen performance increases on M-series Macs since 2020. In the 2010's, we all thought Moore's Law had hit a brick wall in the CPU space, but it turned out that Intel was just shitting the bed from management incompetence and AMD was still down for the count. I expect to see a return-to-normalcy in price and performance at some point, I just can't predict when.
You might be right. I honestly don't know where we are in the death of moores law. I am convinced it will be dead within my lifetime, but I have some years in me yet, haha.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/annotated-apple-m3-processor-die-shots-bring-chip-designs-to-life


After the nanometer we get to the picometer. Note, a picometer is about the radius of a helium atom, according to wiki. So yeah, we will hit a wall in my lifetime...
 
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Read what I posted;

"So in 2023 you paid $1499 and got 60% to 70% of a performance upgrade.

But in 2025 you pay $2000+ and get a 30% "upgrade"

Not cool the way this is trending."


So your ok paying a higher price and get less of a performance upgrade? I'm not.



Zorachus, I'll wait until it's a good deal. You only" need" to buy if you have FOMO like you describe. You're also discounting all the cool new tech and other speedups. P. S. The 4090 was $1600, not $1499.
 
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Thank heavens I'm not starting this hobby now and I actually got to see and experience the beginning of PC gaming and some of the greatest games and hardware. I think it's a new age of gaming and hardware and my best years are behind me. Im not sure if I'll build another gaming rig, I may just upgrade what I have, new cpu, gpu if I can afford one, and probably a lower card like a 6070. At this point I have more interest in going back to my roots and buying a retro rig and playing some of those awesome DOS games and early Windows 95/98 games. Believe it or not I still have my copies of Windows 95 and 98SE.😁
 
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