It is all good to be excited about the upcoming NVIDIA RTX 50-Series GPUs, but if you’re a PC gamer and know anything about the tech inside a GPU, you would know that NVIDIA’s marketing has been hogwash up to now. That’s because the company’s claims of the “improved” performance in the new cards compared to the RTX 40-Series are all based on the new Multi Frame Generation feature.
This new MFG upgrade is a big deal but relies on inserting more artificial frames to the current frames in order to boost the frames – a lot of frames, I know. To compare the 40-series cards here isn’t really comparing apples to apples because these last-gen GPUs are inserting frames at one-third of the 50-series capabilities.
It should all be about the raw performance, right? Thankfully, a few new benchmarks have popped up online that show off the raw performance between the RTX 4080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. Essentially, these scores are results from games that don’t use frame generation, which enables MFG on the new cards. They do, however, use DLSS.
The benchmarks come from ComputerBase and are tested on Resident Evil 4 and Horizon Forbidden West. According to the graphs, the RTX 5090 is about 33% faster than the RTX 4090 on raw performance – not taking into account any artificial frame creation.
Comparing the RTX 5080 to the RTX 4080, it seems there’s only a 15% jump in performance here. The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 show a 20% boost in performance when compared to the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070.
Again, NVIDIA doesn’t share any stats on these slides at all. They are just graphs, in typical NVIDIA fashion. But the general comparison can be seen below.
ComputerBase | Shader Increase | Resident Evil (RT) +
Horizon Forbidden West (DLSS, no MFG) |
RTX 5090 vS. RTX 4090 | +33% | – +33% |
RTX 5080 vS. RTX 4080 | +11% | – +15% |
RTX 5070 Ti vS. RTX 4070 Ti | +17% | – +20% |
RTX 5070 vS. RTX 4070 | +4% | – +20% |
Reviews of the new NVIDIA RTX 50-Series GPUs are expected to go live in the next ten days. We’ll see the RTX 5090 reviews first followed by the RTX 5080 next week. It will be interesting to see how these new cards compare directly to the last generation without looking at the AI frame tech. As an owner of an RTX 4080 SUPER, seeing the 5080 at only 15% more power, I don’t know where exactly my GPU sits now. Perhaps the upgrade won’t be worth it in the end.
AMD is also expected to debut its latest Radeon RX 9000-Series in March after a delayed launch from January. Once both brands have cards on the market, users can directly compare the best value for price.
Source: ComputerBase
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