The latest Nvidia RTX 5090 specs rumour makes the ol' RTX 4090 look like a goddam clown card

If the recently rumoured specs for the new Nvidia RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards are indeed true we're looking at a flagship GPU with a terrifying amount of processing power and a second-tier chip that's already pissing off a lot of gaming folk. 

GeForce RTX 5090PG144/145-SKU30GB202-300-A121760FP32512-bit GDDR7 32G600WSeptember 26, 2024

GeForce RTX 5080PG144/147-SKU45GB203-400-A110752FP32256-bit GDDR7 16G400WSeptember 26, 2024

The latest spec 'leak' has come from more or less reliable X leaker, kopite7kimi, and tells a story of one almighty RTX 5090, with a specs bump that gives it a mouth-watering amount of TSMC-built tech in a single graphics card. And reportedly still a two-slot reference card at that.

It's going to make the RTX 4090 look like a clown card in more ways than one. That Founders Edition is a mammoth graphics card that still makes me laugh every single time I slot it into the test rig in the office, such is its vast, novelty-GPU size. That's going to be going against what is reportedly going to be a dual-slot card will make it look even more outsized. And that's before you get to talk about the conversely mammoth spec of the reported new GPU. With 21,760 CUDA cores (effective FP32 units)—that's still not utilising the full GB202 complement of cores—it's a hefty 33% increase in core count over the RTX 4090, which itself had over 50% more cores than the RTX 3090.

Then the new Nvidia Blackwell flagship GeForce card is reportedly going to be flexing with a 512-bit aggregated memory bus and a full 32 GB of GDDR7 memory. And, guess what, that makes for a 33% increase in both memory and memory bus, too. The increased power numbers (presumably the TGP of the card) suggests a 600 W peak, which, if you've been following the maths, also hits that seemingly magic 33% mark.

I wonder what sort of performance improvement Nvidia is going to be touting with its new card? Surely it's got to do better than 33%? In our testing, the RTX 4090 was, on average, 72%