Earlier this month at CES was the announcement of the GeForce RTX 50 “Blackwell” series. Among the first of these consumer Blackwell GPUs is the GeForce RTX 5090 flagship graphics card that is set to retail for $1999 USD. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition graphics card arrived at Phoronix a few days ago to begin Linux testing.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 isn’t going on sale until 30 January but today marks the “unboxing” embargo on the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition hardware. So we can show it in the flesh now, actual independent hardware hands-on… Sans any benchmarks or performance figures. So I can confirm the GeForce RTX 5090 is at Phoronix for Linux testing, but that’s about it for today.
The GeForce RTX 5090 GPU features a staggering 92 billion transistors. This graphics card comes packed with 21,760 CUDA cores, 32GB of GDDR7 video memory with 1.792 TB/s of memory bandwidth, relies on PCI Express 5.0 for maximum performance, sports HDMI 2.1b and DisplayPort 2.1b with UHBR20 outputs, and brings 4th gen ray-tracing cores and 5th gen tensor cores.
The GeForce RTX 5090 is power hungry with a rated 575 Watt graphics power.
Hands on with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition, make no mistake that it’s a beautifully crafted graphics card. It’s very well built like other NVIDIA Founder’s Edition graphics cards and in my opinion one of their more appealing designs. Plus a marvel of engineering with being able to disipate nearly 600 Watts while being slimmed down compared to the likes of the prior-gen GeForce RTX 4090. Even the cardboard box for this NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card is rather over-engineered.
When making use of DLSS 4 and paired with other NVIDIA innovations, they are talking up to the RTX 5090 as offering 2x the performance of the prior generation RTX 4090. That’s under Microsoft Windows 11, of course, and the native gaming experience there. It will be interesting to see how well the GeForce RTX 5090 manages under Linux with the likes of Steam Play (Proton), native Linux games, and then of course all of the Linux GPU compute workloads, etc.
The expectation is that there will be launch-day packaged Linux driver support for the GeForce RTX 50 series. With the packaged drivers from NVIDIA.com is where they are now using their open-source (out of tree) GPU kernel modules too for all new hardware support. The official NVIDIA Linux packaged driver will likely offer near performance and feature parity to the Windows driver, going off our experiences with prior generation NVIDIA graphics. For those wanting a fully open-source stack, you will be waiting for the likes of Nouveau with GSP or the eventual yet-to-be-upstreamed Rust-based NOVA kernel driver… But for now that would mean a degraded experience so for the best RTX 50 series in the months ahead you’ll definitely best be wanting to use the official packaged driver stack for making full use of the hardware capabilities and to maximum performance potential.
That’s about it for today with just the unboxing embargo up and then general Linux expectations given my close NVIDIA Linux monitoring for the past two decades. Stay tuned for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Blackwell Linux benchmarks at the appropriate time. Thanks to NVIDIA for providing this review sample for launch-day Linux testing around the performance and support of this flagship Blackwell consumer GPU outside the confines of Microsoft Windows.
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