With the new Nvidia drop there has been a large amount of controversy over the AI upscaling and frame rate improvements. Many other GPUs in the past have utilized some form of AI upscaling but this latest release has brought a noticeable decline in actual performance, replaced instead by artificially generated improvements.
Some of these physical performance downgrades includes the 5070 containing half the vram (4090 has 24, meanwhile the 5070 has only 12), which in turn leads to the shading units in the 5070 to being approximately 1/3 as in the 4090. Other downgrades include the 5070 having approximately half the ROPs, compute units, tensor cores, ray tracing cores, and transistors.
Many may say that comparing the 5070 to the 4090 is an unfair comparison, but unfortunately the 5090 is not much of an improvement from the 4090. Moore’s law states that the transistor count in an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years, unfortunately this concept has diminishing returns as the chips get smaller, and more transistors are introduced, eventually there is little room for improvement.
Nvidia 4090 vs 5090
Essentially, the improvements made from the 4090 to the 5090 were minimal as there was no physical way to improve the transistor count and decrease the size leading to a similar performance between both GPUs. The main difference between the 5090 and the 4090 was the improvement in AI, where the 5090 was able to use generated frames to increase performance. This generated performance is accurate, but in most cases unnecessary, as both the 5090 and the 4090 offer the highest performance of any GPU right now.
The Best Budget Option
Although the 5070 offers lower overall performance it could be an extremely good budget option for a GPU. The price of a new 4090 is currently at $1,499 (with the 5090 being at $2000), meanwhile the 5070 comes in at a meager $500. With the AI performance of the 5070 its performance is comparable to the 4090, making it an excellent option for those who don’t mind the generated performance.
Overall, the new 5000 generation has still made improvements, but it is a small step in the right direction, meanwhile the 5090 wouldn’t be worth the $500 price increase for the minimal performance increase.
My Personal opinion
As for my opinion, I believe that the 5070 is worth it when looking for budget GPUs, but the 5090 isn’t worth the extra $500. When looking for the best performance I would instead purchase the 4090 or wait until the next Nvidia drop and hope that a bigger jump is made. If you don’t mind switching brands, AMD offers a wide range of GPUs that can offer great performance. My personal favorites are in the 6000 series as I feel they have the best price for the performance they offer. I own the 6800xt and I am able to play most games at 200+ fps, as well as run intensive software such as Houdini at high performance. The 6800xt currently costs $650, which is both cheap for a graphics card and offers more than enough performance for both gamers and pc enthusiasts.