RTX 50 Series Offers Limited Performance Gains Over RTX 40 Series Without DLSS 4.0 & MFG

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Performance Gap Between RTX 4090 Vs. RTX 3090 Was Upto 72%

Story Highlight
  • The RTX 5090 shows a good performance boost over the 4090, but the jump is not as huge as it was from RTX 4090 to 3090.
  • In A Plague Tale: Requiem (using DLSS 3) RTX 5090 is around 43% faster than 4090, but 4090 was 72% faster than 3090.
  • To put this into perspective, Far Cry 6 runs 47% faster on RTX 4090 than 3090.

Nvidia has had a huge presence at this year’s CES event, overtaking many of its counterparts with its GPU reveals. The tech giant revealed the new DLSS 4 upscaler—to contend against AMD’s FSR 4.0—and AI Foundation Models.

However, its biggest showing was arguably the GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs with the Blackwell architecture, promising huge advancements in AI-powered rendering, real-time ray tracing, NVIDIA Reflex 2 with Frame Warp, and much more.

While Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 has prominent performance gains over the 4090, the difference is not as massive as we saw in comparisons between the RTX 4090 and 3090

Why it matters: The GeForce RTX 5090 shows smaller performance gains without DLSS 4 compared to the 4090’s improvements over the 3090. This suggests that rasterization performance boosts may continue to decrease with each new generation as Green Camp will continue to improve its AI models to showcase big numbers in FPS.

GeForce RTX 50 vs RTX 40 series performance gap
GeForce RTX 50 Series Performance Increase vs. GeForce RTX 40 Series Performance Based on Official Presentation

The graph compiled by us based on the presentation from Nvidia shows that A Plague Tale: Requiem is nearly up to 44% faster in RTX 5090 compared to 4090—provided both GPUs are using DLSS 3 only. On the flip side, the RTX 4090 was up to 72% faster than the RTX 3090 under similar conditions.

On the other side, concerning Nvidia’s claim of RTX 5070 beating RTX 4090, it seems almost impossible—without using the new Multi Frame Gen (MFG) — if you analyze the chart.

And it’s worth noting that frame generation doesn’t technically boost FPS performance either; it’s a frame smoothening technology, after all. So, the generational leap doesn’t feel as massive as one might’ve expected considering these pointers. We doubt it will even beat GeForce RTX 4080 in the same scenarios as above. 

A similar pattern can also be seen when Far Cry 6 is tested. It performs up to 27% faster on the RTX 5090 vs. the RTX 4090 without DLSS 4 being used. The performance racks up to 47% on the RTX 4090 when pitted against the RTX 3090.

Using the RTX 5080, the performance gains for Ubisoft’s AAA entry reach up to 33%. The 5070 Ti—along with the base variant—also hovers around the same 30%+ range.

DLSS 4
Using RTX 5090’s exclusive DLSS Multi Frame Generation gives a huge boost over the 4090 in-game performance.

All in all, take tests shown during the CES official presentation with a grain of salt, as the GeForce RTX 5090 does get a huge boost in performance when DLSS 4 and the new Multi Frame Generation are used.

Do you think Nvidia’s new flagship RTX 5090 is still worth it against the RTX 4090 despite the smaller generation leap in performance leaps and increased price? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, or join the discussion on the official Tech4Gamers forum.

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