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.
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.
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.
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