NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU shown to be 36% faster than RTX 4090 in claimed benchmark

NVIDIA's RTX 5090 has been the subject of another (apparent) leaked benchmark, and this time we've caught wind of the flagship graphics card's Blender performance.

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The RTX 5090 tops the Blender benchmark chart as you'd expect (Image Credit: Blender Foundation)

At least if these results pan out, and as VideoCardz observes, the likelihood is that a couple of reviewers have been running the RTX 5090 through its paces, and they've done so without realizing that being connected to the internet allows the Blender scores to be recorded online (either that, or they forgot about the need to take their PC offline).

Yes, the next-gen Blackwell flagship is now in the hands of hardware critics, ahead of reviews emerging next week, in theory, but here we've got an early glimpse of Blender performance for both the RTX 5090 and also an RTX 5090D in Asia (the successor to the 4090D in that region, of course).

The RTX 5090 is shown as 36% faster than the RTX 4090 in Blender, and the RTX 5090D is around 28% faster than its predecessor. Add seasoning, of course, but these graphics cards were tested using different versions of Blender, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in terms of working out the relative difference in performance between the RTX 5090 and its 5090D variant.

Chimes with existing rumors

That figure of the RTX 5090 being a third faster also falls in line with another purported benchmark from Geekbench, where this was witnessed as the apparent generational uplift in that suite's graphics tests (Vulkan and OpenCL runs).

From what we've seen with other recent spillage, the RTX 5090 could be a good deal more modest in terms of the uplift on the RTX 4090 compared to what the rumor mill previously primed us to believe. But that said, it seems the grapevine was working off best-case scenarios where DLSS 4 and MFG (Multi Frame Generation) were brought into the mix for some huge FPS boosts.

With more recent info NVIDIA has served up, it seems again that the raw generational uplift for the RTX 5090 will be more like 30% for gaming scenarios, although that's still guesswork to a sizeable extent (based on estimations from bar charts Team Green has aired, and only a couple of games out of them all didn't have their gen-on-gen comparisons clouded by MFG).

As ever, we'll need to wait for reviews to see exactly where the RTX 5090's gaming performance will land - those reviews supposedly arrive on January 23, only half a week away now - but the general suggestion seems to be to temper your expectations for games that don't support NVIDIA's new frame generation wizardry (aka 'fake frames' in many circles).