Our raster (non-RT) game benchmarks kick off with the ABCs - Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077. We've aimed for a range of genres and engines here to ensure a representative sample, from custom powerhouses in Remedy's Northlight and CDPR's RED Engine to the ubiquitous Unreal Engine 5. The Alan Wake and Cyberpunk benches are both custom jobs, traversing some of the most demanding areas in their respective game worlds, while the Wukong benchmark is taken from a cutscene right at the start of the game.

As usual, readers on mobile-class browsers will see basic tables showing frame-rate averages, while viewers on full-fat browsers get the deluxe package: animated bar charts that let you mouse over to see advanced metrics, plus an embedded YouTube video that can be played to see frame-rates and frame-times fluctuate throughout the benchmark run.

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2, High Settings, RT Off

Alan Wake 2 running at high settings without RT - going to be easy, right? Well, at a native 4K, only the 5090 is able to eclipse a 60fps average, with a 26 percent improvement over the 4090. Versus the 3090 Ti, performance more than doubles, while the 5090 leads the 2080 Ti by nearly 2.5x.

Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth: Wukong, Cinematic, RT Off

Black Myth: Wukong uses software RT, so it's reasonable to include it in our rasterised benchmarks. The prologue of the game is actually more demanding than what follows for much of the run of play, so we're using it instead of the canned benchmark. The RTX 5090 exhibits a 24.6 percent improvement over the 4090, a straight doubling of frame-rates against the 3090 Ti and a 3.3x boost over 2080 Ti.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077, Ultra Settings, RT Off

Our custom driving benchmark returns for our non-RT testing, with ultra settings used instead. Here, the RTX 4090 and 5090 both exceed the 4K 60fps threshold without DLSS, but the 5090's superior memory bandwidth allows it to snatch a cushy 56 percent lead against the old flagship. This number seems implausible and the first rule of benchmarking is that if something looks wrong, it usually is wrong. However, this test was re-run multiple times. This result translates into 2.26x the performance of the 3090 Ti and 3.56x the frame-rate of the 2080 Ti.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Analysis