2025 sees the latest revision of our GPU test suite, with new and returning games that we've retrofitted with custom benchmarks to highlight stress points. The selection includes many titles that we've highlighted as offering the best graphics in gaming, and for a flagship-grade card like the RTX 5090 we have no qualms about choosing extremely demanding settings.

We begin with a selection of ray tracing titles, as this typically offers the toughest test of a modern graphics card and use of RT continues to ramp up as we proceed throughout the 2020s. On this page, we have three games famed for their environments - the temperate forests of Alan Wake 2, the jungles of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the city streets of Cyberpunk 2077.

If this is the first time you're seeing a Digital Foundry graphics card review on Eurogamer, our benchmarking system deserves a short introduction. On mobile devices you'll see simple performance tables for each graphics card and resolution we tested, while on desktop-class browsers you'll get an embedded YouTube video and animated bar chart. Click play on the video to see our test scene unfold with live metrics, or mouse over the bar chart to see the various measurements. You can also click on the bar chart to change from absolute frame-rate readings to percentages.

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2, High, Low RT

The forest scenes in Alan Wake 2 see the lowest frame-rates in the game when RT is enabled, so that's exactly what we've got here with a custom run-through of the trouble spot. The RTX 5090 shows a 35 percent improvement over the RTX 4090 at 4K, or a 2.5x performance increase versus the older 3090 Ti.

There's no DLSS and no frame generation being used here, so the base frame-rates are relatively low, at just a 47fps average for the 5090. Let's be clear about something though - it isn't about developers relying on upscaling, it's that they're pushing technology harder and offering more scalability to end users if they have the hardware available, with frame generation and upscaling helping enable that. Remember, this game runs on the Xbox Series S and gaming handhelds!

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Ultra Settings

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is an interesting one because it scales the game according to available VRAM, so the RTX 2080 Ti is a bit more competitive at 4K native and ultra settings. The 5090 is 23 percentage points clear of the 4090 - one of the lower gen-on-gen increases we'll see - and again we have a 2x multiplier over the RTX 3090 Ti.

Cyberpunk 2077 (RT)

Cyberpunk 2077, Psycho RT

We conclude this page with Cyberpunk 2077, running in its "Psycho RT" configuration on a retail build of the game, rather than the press build Nvidia gave out for multi frame generation testing. There's a 30 percent increase for the 5090 over the 4090, right in line with expectations based on the spec difference. We're just above a 2x improvement versus the 3090 Ti, while the 2080 Ti languishes - likely due to the 11GB VRAM allocation on this 2018-era flagship.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Analysis