Purported NVIDIA RTX 5090 benchmarks seem a rather disappointing result for the flagship GPU

NVIDIA's RTX 5090 has been spotted in some benchmarks that give us an idea of its performance outside of DLSS 4 (and Multi Frame Generation) boosts.

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NVIDIA's Founders Edition of the RTX 5090 is still highly likely to sell out in a flash, however the benchmarks look (Image Credit: NVIDIA)

The catch is that these aren't gaming benchmarks with DLSS 4 turned off, but rather, Geekbench Vulkan and OpenCL runs.

So no, these are far from ideal as a way of gauging the Blackwell flagship's performance, but, assuming the scores are accurate, they do give us a flavor of the raw generational uplift we're looking at here compared to the RTX 4090.

There were three scores spotted (by BenchLeaks via VideoCardz), and for Vulkan, the RTX 5090 purportedly hit 359,000 in two of those runs, and 331,000 in another. That compares to the RTX 4090 at 262,000, indicating that the RTX 5090 is about a third faster than its predecessor (averaging those scores out).

With Geekbench OpenCL, we see scores of around 367,000, 356,000 and 338,000, compared to about 317,000 for the RTX 4090. So, in this case, the RTX 5090 is only around 11% faster.

Don't get carried away with pessimism, though, as the comparisons are rough ones, and there are a lot of unknowns here - and as noted, Geekbench is not the pick for testing a GPU's gaming prowess.

Still, this is another apparent rather lackluster showing from the RTX 5090, on top of the recent in-game non-DLSS 4 benchmarks that were provided by NVIDIA.

Read more: NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090D for China has restricted AI, crypto-mining performance