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Folks, ask yourselves, what game is out there that REALLY needs a 5090? If you have the money to piss away, by all means, it’s your money. But let’s face it, games have plateaued and VR isn’t all that great.
Nvidia’s market is not you anymore. It’s the massive corporations and research firms for useless AI projects or number crunching. They have more money than all gamers combined. Maybe time to go outside; me included.
Cyberpunk 2077 with the VR mod is the only one I can think of. Because it’s not natively built for VR you have to render the world separately for each eye leading to a halving of the overall frame rate. And with 90 fps as the bare minimum for many people in VR you really don’t have a choice but to use the 5090.
Yeah it’s literally only one game/mod, but that would be my use case if I could afford it.
Also the Train World Sim Series. Those games make my tower complain, and my laptop give up.
It covers the breadth of problems pretty well, but I feel compelled to point out that there are a few times where things are misrepresented in this post e.g.:
Newegg selling the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 for $3,359 (MSRP: $1,999)
eBay Germany offering the same ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 for €3,349,95 (MSRP: €2,229)
The MSRP for a 5090 is $2k, but the MSRP for the 5090 Astral – a top-end card being used for overclocking world records – is $2.8k. I couldn’t quickly find the European MSRP but my money’s on it being more than 2.2k euro.
If you’re a creator, CUDA and NVENC are pretty much indispensable, or editing and exporting videos in Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve will take you a lot longer[3]. Same for live streaming, as using NVENC in OBS offloads video rendering to the GPU for smooth frame rates while streaming high-quality video.
NVENC isn’t much of a moat right now, as both Intel and AMD’s encoders are roughly comparable in quality these days (including in Intel’s iGPUs!). There are cases where NVENC might do something specific better (like 4:2:2 support for prosumer/professional use cases) or have better software support in a specific program, but for common use cases like streaming/recording gameplay the alternatives should be roughly equivalent for most users.
as recently as May 2025 and I wasn’t surprised to find even RTX 40 series are still very much overpriced
Production apparently stopped on these for several months leading up to the 50-series launch; it seems unreasonable to harshly judge the pricing of a product that hasn’t had new stock for an extended period of time (of course, you can then judge either the decision to stop production or the still-elevated pricing of the 50 series).
DLSS is, and always was, snake oil
I personally find this take crazy given that DLSS2+ / FSR4+, when quality-biased, average visual quality comparable to native for most users in most situations and that was with DLSS2 in 2023, not even DLSS3 let alone DLSS4 (which is markedly better on average). I don’t really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn’t come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being “fake” reflections. Like yeah, it’s fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?
Increasingly complex manufacturing nodes are becoming increasingly expensive as all fuck. If it’s more cost-efficient to use some of that die area for specialized cores that can do high-quality upscaling instead of natively rendering everything with all the die space then that’s fine by me. I don’t think blaming DLSS (and its equivalents like FSR and XeSS) as “snake oil” is the right takeaway. If the options are (1) spend $X on a card that outputs 60 FPS natively or (2) spend $X on a card that outputs upscaled 80 FPS at quality good enough that I can’t tell it’s not native, then sign me the fuck up for option #2. For people less fussy about static image quality and more invested in smoothness, they can be perfectly happy with 100 FPS but marginally worse image quality. Not everyone is as sweaty about static image quality as some of us in the enthusiast crowd are.
There’s some fair points here about RT (though I find exclusively using path tracing for RT performance testing a little disingenuous given the performance gap), but if RT performance is the main complaint then why is the sub-heading “DLSS is, and always was, snake oil”?
obligatory: disagreeing with some of the author’s points is not the same as saying “Nvidia is great”
Thanks for providing insights and inviting a more nuanced discussion. I find it extremely frustrating that in communities like Lemmy it’s risky to write comments like this because people assume you’re “taking sides.”
The entire point of the community should be to have discourse about a topic and go into depth, yet most comments and indeed entire threads are just “Nvidia bad!” with more words.
Obligatory disclaimer that I, too, don’t necessarily side with Nvidia.
I don’t really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn’t come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being “fake” reflections. Like yeah, it’s fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?
But it does come with increased latency. It also disrupts the artistic vision of games. With MFG you’re seeing more fake frames than real frames. It’s deceptive and like snake oil in that Nvidia isn’t distinguishing between fake frames and real frames. I forget what the exact comparison is, but when they say “The RTX 5040 has the same performance as the RTX 4090” but that’s with 3 fake frames for every real frame, that’s incredibly deceptive.
I think DLSS (and FSR and so on) are great value propositions but they become a problem when developers use them as a crutch. At the very least your game should not need them at all to run on high end hardware on max settings. With them then being options for people on lower end hardware to either lower settings or combine higher settings with upscaling. When they become mandatory they stop being a value proposition since the benefit stops being a benefit and starts just being neccesary for baseline performance.
Is it because it’s not how they make money now?
I wish I had the money to change to AMD
This is a sentence I never thought I would read.
^(AMD used to be cheap)^
Have a 2070s. Been thinking for a while now my next card will be AMD. I hope they get back into the high end cards again :/
The 9070 XT is excellent and FSR 4 actually beats DLSS 4 in some important ways, like disocclusion.
Concur.
I went from a 2080 Super to the RX 9070 XT and it flies. Coupled with a 9950X3D, I still feel a little bit like the GPU might be the bottleneck, but it doesn’t matter. It plays everything I want at way more frames than I need (240 Hz monitor).
E.g., Rocket League went from struggling to keep 240 fps at lowest settings, to 700+ at max settings. Pretty stark improvement.
AMD only releases high end for servers and high end workstations
My mind is still blown on why people are so interested in spending 2x the cost of the entire machine they are playing on AND a hefty power utility bill to run these awful products from Nvidia. Generational improvements are minor on the performance side, and fucking AWFUL on the product and efficiency side. You’d think people would have learned their lessons a decade ago.
they pay because AMD (or any other for that matter) has no product to compete with a 5080 or 5090
I have overclocked my AMD 7900XTX as far as it will go on air alone.
Undervolted every step on the frequency curve, cranked up the power, 100% fan duty cycles.
At it’s absolute best, it’s competitive or trades blows with the 4090D, and is 6% slower than the RTX 4090 Founder’s Edition (the slowest of the stock 4090 lineup).
The fastest AMD card is equivalent to a 4080 Super, and the next gen hasn’t shown anything new.
AMD needs a 5090-killer. Dual socket or whatever monstrosity which pulls 800W, but it needs to slap that greenbo with at least a 20-50% lead in frame rates across all titles, including raytraced. Then we’ll see some serious price cuts and competition.
That’s exactly it, they have no competition at the high end
Because they choose not to go full idiot though. They could make their top-line cards to compete if they slam enough into a pipeline and require a dedicated PSU to compete, but that’s not where their product line intends to go. That’s why it’s smart.
For reference: AMD has the most deployed GPUs on the planet as of right now. There’s a reason why it’s in every gaming console except Switch 1/2, and why OpenAI just partnered with them for chips. The goal shouldn’t just making a product that churns out results at the cost of everything else does, but to be cost-effective and efficient. Nvidia fails at that on every level.
this openai partnership really stands out, because the server world is dominated by nvidia, even more than in consumer cards.
Yup. You want a server? Dell just plain doesn’t offer anything but Nvidia cards. You want to build your own? The GPGPU stuff like zluda is brand new and not really supported by anyone. You want to participate in the development community, you buy Nvidia and use CUDA.
Fortunately, even that tide is shifting.
I’ve been talking to Dell about it recently, they’ve just announced new servers (releasing later this year) which can have either Nvidia’s B300 or AMD’s MI355x GPUs. Available in a hilarious 19" 10RU air-cooled form factor (XE9685), or ORv3 3OU water-cooled (XE9685L).
It’s the first time they’ve offered a system using both CPU and GPU from AMD - previously they had some Intel CPU / AMD GPU options, and AMD CPU / Nvidia GPU, but never before AMD / AMD.
With AMD promising release day support for PyTorch and other popular programming libraries, we’re also part-way there on software. I’m not going to pretend like needing CUDA isn’t still a massive hump in the road, but “everyone uses CUDA” <-> “everyone needs CUDA” is one hell of a chicken-and-egg problem which isn’t getting solved overnight.
Realistically facing that kind of uphill battle, AMD is just going to have to compete on price - they’re quoting 40% performance/dollar improvement over Nvidia for these upcoming GPUs, so perhaps they are - and trying to win hearts and minds with rock-solid driver/software support so people who do have the option (ie in-house code, not 3rd-party software) look to write it with not-CUDA.
To note, this is the 3rd generation of the MI3xx series (MI300, MI325, now MI350/355). I think it might be the first one to make the market splash that AMD has been hoping for.
AMD’s also apparently unifying their server and consumer gpu departments for RDNA5/UDNA iirc, which I’m really hoping helps with this too
I know Dell has been doing a lot of AMD CPUs recently, and those have definitely been beating Intel, so hopefully this continues. But I’ll believe it when I see it. Often, these things rarely pan out in terms of price/performance and support.
yeah, I helped raise hw requirements for two servers recently, an alternative to nvidia wasn’t even on the table
Actually…not true. Nvidia recently became bigger in the DC because of their terrible inference cards being bought up, but AMD overtook Intel on chips with all major cloud platforms last year, and their Xilinix chips are slowly overtaking the sales of regular CPUs for special purposes processing. By the end of this year, I bet AMD will be the most deployed brand in datacenters globally. FPGA is the only path forward in the architecture world at this point for speed and efficiency in single-purpose processing. Nvidia doesn’t have a competing product.
we’re talking GPUs, idk why you’re bringing FPGA and CPUs in the mix
Unfortunately, this partnership with OpenAI means they’ve sided with evil and I won’t spend a cent on their products anymore.
Then why does Nvidia have so much more money?
See the title of this very post you’re responding to. No, I’m not OP lolz
They have so much money because they’re full of shit? Doesn’t make much sense.
Stock isnt money in the bank.
No one said anything about stock.
He’s not OP. He’s just another person…
What do you even need those graphics cards for?
Even the best games don’t require those and if they did, I wouldn’t be interested in them, especially if it’s an online game.
Probably only a couple people would be playing said game with me.
Once the 9070 dropped all arguments for Nvidia stopped being worthy of consideration outside of very niche/fringe needs.
Got my 9070XT at retail (well retail + VAT but thats retail for my country) and my entire PC costs less than a 5090.
Yeah I got a 9070 + 9800x3d for around $1100 all-in. Couldn’t be happier with the performance. Expedition 33 running max settings at 3440x1440 and 80-90fps
Well, to be fair the 10 series was actually an impressive improvement to what was available. Since then I switched to AMD for better SW support. I know since then the improvements have dwindled.
AMD is at least running the smart game on their hardware releases with generational leaps instead of just jacking up power requirements and clock speeds as Nvidia does. Hell, even Nvidia’s latest lines of Jetson are just recooked versions from years ago.
But but but but but my shadows look 3% more realistic now!
The best part is, for me, ray tracing looks great. When I’m standing there and slowly looking around.
When I’m running and gunning and shits exploding, I don’t think the human eye is even capable of comprehending the difference between raster and ray tracing at that point.
Yeah, that’s what’s always bothered me about the drive for the highest-fidelity graphics possible. In motion, those details are only visible for a frame or two in most cases.
For instance, some of the PC mods I’ve seen for Cyberpunk 2077 look absolutely gorgeous… in screenshots. But once you get into a car and start driving or get into combat, it looks nearly indistinguishable from what I see playing the vanilla game on my PS5.
Cause numbers go brrrrrrrrr
If you’re on Windows it’s hard to recommend anything else. Nvidia has DLSS supported in basically every game. For recent games there’s the new transformer DLSS. Add to that ray reconstruction, superior ray tracing, and a steady stream of new features. That’s the state of the art, and if you want it you gotta pay Nvidia. AMD is about 4 years behind Nvidia in terms of features. Intel is not much better. The people who really care about advancements in graphics and derive joy from that are all going to buy Nvidia because there’s no competition.
First, DLSS is supported on Linux.
Second, DLSS is kinda bullshit. The article goes into details that are fairly accurate.
Lastly, AMD is at parity with Nvidia with features. You can see my other comments, but AMD’s goal isn’t selling cards for gamers. Especially ones that require an entire dedicated PSU to power them.
Don’t you mean NVidia’s goal isn’t selling cards for gamers?
No. AMD. See my other comments in this thread. Though they are in every major gaming console, the bulk of AMD sales are aimed at the datacenter.
And only toke 15 years to figure it out?
