GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Guy Cocker
THE RELEASE of a new high-end GPU might just be the most exciting event in PC technology—at least, it ought to be. No question; the arrival of Nvidia’s mighty new RTX 5090 (hop on over to page 74 for the review) is a seminal moment. It’s the fastest graphics card known to humanity—clearly quicker than the outgoing RTX 4090, itself a beast of a GPU. Yet, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the 5090 could—and maybe should—have been better still.
That’s partly down to the fact that the price has gone up perfectly in proportion to the added performance, but also thanks to the light the 5090 sheds on expectations concerning upcoming GPUs from further down the RTX 50 stack. All will unfold in the next few issues, but going by both the performance of the 5090 and Nvidia’s specifications and benchmarks, there are some disappointments to come.