Is the Nvidia RTX 5090 Worth Buying in Late 2025?

The Nvidia RTX 5090 was originally released in January 2025, but is it still worth buying in late 2025? Or should you wait for the RTX 6090?

MSI Gaming RTX 5090 32G Gaming Trio OC (Image via MSI)

Contents

The Nvidia RTX 5090 was and still is the fastest GPU in the world. There is no doubt about that, but its exorbitant pricing tag makes it hard to recommend. Its predecessor, RTX 4090, launched at $1,599, which itself was a high price. Unfortunately, when Nvidia launched the RTX 5090, the price was set to $1,999. However, even that wasn’t the real price, as the GPU was actually selling at around $2,699 to $2,999.

It has been almost 10 months since this card launched, and the price has come down to as low as $2,249.99, but it’s still more than the launch price. This begs the question: Is the RTX 5090 worth buying in late 2025, especially at the inflated price? Or, should you wait for the RTX 6090 or any other GPU? These are the questions we plan to answer today with a detailed assessment and benchmark of the Nvidia RTX 5090. Read on to learn more.

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Note: Parts of this article are subjective and reflect the writer’s opinions.

Nvidia RTX 5090: A Detailed Assessment

The RTX 5090 is designed on the Nvidia Blackwell architecture. This resulted in significant improvements to the memory system, shader sub-system, RT cores, and other areas. Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 5090 also has a significantly higher number of shader cores, RT cores, TMUs, ROPs, and more. Therefore, it brings a considerably higher performance.

However, the question is whether the performance you get is worth paying the price it asks for, and that’s what we will find out today. Let’s start with the specs first.

Specification

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MSI Gaming RTX 5090 32G Gaming Trio — MSI Gaming RTX 5090 32G Gaming Trio (Image via MSI)

Here are the specs of the Nvidia RTX 5090:

Specifications	Nvidia RTX 5090
Architecture	Blackwell
Shader cores	21760
RT cores	170
TMUs	680
ROPs	176
Base core clock speeds	2017 MHz
Boost core clock speeds	2407 MHz
Memory capacity	32GB GDDR7
Memory bus width	512-bit
Memory bandwidth	1.79 TB/s
Manufacturing node	5nm
Thermal design power (TDPs)	575W

The specs table says it all. The RTX 5090 truly has flagship-level specs. It is also equipped with 32GB of fast GDDR7 memory. Therefore, you will never have any VRAM-related issues in gaming. The only issue this GPU has is its high 575W power consumption, but it shouldn’t be a problem if you have a 1100W or higher wattage PSU.

Gaming Performance

It’s time we put the specs aside and look at some actual gaming benchmarks. After all, you want to buy RTX 5090 to play games, right? Therefore, let’s find out how it performs in some actual games on the market:

Games	Nvidia RTX 5090
Alan Wake 2 (PT Medium)	60 FPS
God of War: Ragnarok	171 FPS
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024	93 FPS
Hogwarts Legacy (RT Ultra)	66 FPS
Ghost of Tsushima	123 FPS
Forza Horizon 5	180 FPS
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2	91 FPS
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2	103 FPS
Star Wars Outlaws (RT High)	103 FPS
Horizon Forbidden West	127 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 (RT Ultra)	100 FPS

Note: The two GPUs tested here were evaluated at a 4K resolution with High/Ultra Settings, unless otherwise specified. All the FPS numbers were sourced from the Testing Games channel on YouTube. For the tests, the two graphics cards were paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU.

The Nvidia RTX 5090 delivered 60+ in every game benchmarked above. Even in ray tracing games, such as Hogwarts Legacy, Star Wars Outlaws, and Cyberpunk 2077, this GPU delivered 60 FPS, 103 FPS, and 100 FPS, respectively. The RT settings were set to High/Ultra, yet this graphics card achieved high frame rates. This goes to show just how powerful the RTX 5090 is.

However, you may have noticed that Alan Wake 2 was running on path-traced Medium settings instead of High. That’s because path tracing is way more advanced than ray tracing, and it is far more demanding. That’s why the path-traced settings were set to Medium to achieve a stable 60 FPS. You can use path-traced High settings as well, but you will need to enable DLSS and set it to Balanced mode to hit 60+ FPS.

Pricing

The Nvidia RTX 5090 is currently available for as low as $2,249.99 on Amazon as of this writing. This is still quite a bit above the MSRP, despite being launched almost 10 months ago.

Is the Nvidia RTX 5090 Worth Buying in Late 2025?

The Nvidia RTX 5090 is the ultimate GPU you can buy for 4K gaming with true ray tracing. It can even do path tracing quite well if you use DLSS. Also, if you have a high-refresh-rate 4K monitor, you can utilize DLSS MFG to quadruple your frame rates. There’s no doubt that this is the most powerful GPU in 2025, but its exorbitant price tag makes it a distant dream for many.

Besides, $2,249.99 is a lot of money, and the performance it delivers, while great, is not worth that kind of money. GPUs or any other PC component usually decrease in price as they age. While the pricing did decrease from its initial inflated prices, it is not enough.

If you compare it to other GPUs, the Nvidia RTX 5080 is only 35.14% slower than the RTX 5090, yet it costs only around $979.99, which is less than half the price of the RTX 5090. Similarly, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT costs substantially less, yet it is only around 42% slower. This makes it difficult to recommend the Nvidia RTX 5090, especially in late 2025.

If budget is not an issue and you want the best possible performance, then go ahead and buy the RTX 5090. However, if you care about value, then the RTX 5090 is not worth buying now. If you have a decent GPU in your PC already, we would suggest holding on to it until the RTX 6090 or whatever the next flagship GPU is called. It should not only deliver more performance but also provide more value.

However, if you are building a new PC and must select a new graphics card, then we would recommend going with the Nvidia RTX 5080 or the Radeon RX 9070 XT instead.

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Is the Nvidia RTX 5090 Worth Buying in Late 2025?