Should You Upgrade to an Nvidia RTX 50 Series GPU?

The RTX 50 Series launched with impressive benchmarks from Nvidia, but it was not so impressive in real-world tests. So, should you upgrade?

Picture of The Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition — The Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition (Image via Nvidia)

Nvidia made some bold claims when it launched the RTX 50 series GPUs at the CES 2025 event. It claimed that the RTX 5070 would deliver RTX 4090 performance, which turned out to be a marketing gimmick. Nvidia basically used Multi-Frame Generation, which produced AI-rendered frames to boost the FPS. In an actual hardware-based comparison, the RTX 5070 fell completely flat on Nvidia’s claim.

Not only did the RTX 5070 fail to beat the RTX 4090, but it even failed to topple the RTX 4070 Super card on some occasions. Similar claims about RTX 5080 doubling the performance of the RTX 4080 were made, and they too turned out to be false. This raises the question: How good are the RTX 50 series cards? And should you upgrade to it from your old GPU? The short answer is no, but there’s more to it. In this article, we have answered all your questions, so read till the end to find out.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer’s opinions.

What Improvements Do the Nvidia RTX 50 Series GPUs Deliver?

Pictire of MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Gaming Trio OC — MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Gaming Trio OC (Image via MSI)

The RTX 5090 is the only RTX 50 series card that brought some serious improvements over the RTX 4090. That’s because it was the only GPU with substantially higher CUDA cores, RT cores, and more. Every other RTX 50 series graphics card was either designed with a similar core configuration or lower. That’s why they failed to deliver a good enough performance jump over the RTX 40 series.

Let’s check the specs of the top three RTX 50 series graphics cards compared to their RTX 40 series counterparts. It will show you exactly what we mean:

Specs Comparison

Specifications	Nvidia RTX 5090	Nvidia RTX 4090	Nvidia RTX 5080	Nvidia RTX 4080	Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti	Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super	Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti
Architecture	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Ada Lovelace
CUDA Cores	170	128	84	76	70	66	60
Shader cores	21760	16384	10752	9728	8960	8448	7680
RT cores	170	128	84	76	70	66	60
TMUs	680	512	336	304	280	264	240
ROPs	176	176	112	112	96	96	80
Base core clock speeds	2017 MHz	2235 MHz	2295 MHz	2205 MHz	2295 MHz	2340 MHz	2310 MHz
Boost core clock speeds	2407 MHz	2520 MHz	2617 MHz	2505 MHz	2452 MHz	2610 MHz	2610 MHz
Memory capacity	32 GB GDDR7	24 GB GDDR6X	16 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR6X	16 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR6X	12 GB GDDR6X
Memory bus width	512-bit	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Memory bandwidth	1.79 TB/s	1.01 TB/s	960.0 GB/s	716.8 GB/s	896.0 GB/s	672.3 GB/s	504.2 GB/s
Manufacturing node	5nm	5nm	5nm	5nm	5nm	5nm	5nm
Thermal design power (TDPs)	575W	450W	360W	320W	300W	285 W	285 W

The RTX 50 Series Improvements

The above table lays out a clear picture. Only the RTX 5090 was designed with significantly higher CUDA cores, RT cores, and memory. In fact, the former has 32% higher CUDA cores and 77% higher memory bandwidth. This explains why the RTX 5090 delivered such a significant performance improvement over its predecessor.

The rest of the lineup received mediocre changes. Let’s take the RTX 5080, for example. It had only 10% more CUDA cores compared to the RTX 4080, and it delivers about 10-15% higher performance. Similarly, the RTX 5070 Ti has 6% and around 16% more cores than the RTX 4070 Ti Super and the RTX 4070 Ti, respectively. The performance improvement is just as lackluster as the RTX 4080.

The same is also true for the RTX 5070 compared to the RTX 4070 and 4070 Super. On some rare occasions, the RTX 5070 actually lost to the RTX 4070 Super, especially when heavy ray tracing or path tracing was involved.

Should You Upgrade Your GPU to an Nvidia RTX 50 Series Card?

Picture of Nvidia RTX 5070 vs RTX 4070 SUPER — Nvidia RTX 5070 vs RTX 4070 SUPER (Image via BENCHMARKS FOR GAMERS channel on YouTube)

Whether you should upgrade to the RTX 50 series GPUs depends on a few factors. If you are upgrading from an older GPU generation, such as the Nvidia GTX 9 or 10 series, then yes, you can upgrade to any RTX 50 series graphics card. If you are upgrading from an AMD Radeon 480, 580, or even the 5000 series, you can upgrade to the latest NVIDIA RTX 50 series cards.

However, if you are thinking about upgrading from RTX 40, 30, or even the 20 series GPUs, you shouldn’t. The RTX 30 series didn’t bring a substantial improvement over the RTX 20 series. This is also true for the RTX 40 series, which didn’t deliver a significant improvement, except for the RTX 4090. Only the RTX 4090 and 5090 actually innovated, while the rest of the lineup failed to bring a generational uplift. If you didn’t find the RTX 40 series attractive, then the RTX 50 series is in a similar situation.

We would rather recommend holding onto your dear GPUs for at least this generation and waiting for the RTX 60 series or whatever Nvidia names the next-gen cards. We are not saying the RTX 60 series will be better, but it wouldn’t be worse than the RTX 50 series. If you can’t wait for the next-gen GPUs, then at least wait for the RTX 50 Super series of graphics cards. They are expected to launch later this year or early next year.

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