We challenge all desktops’ graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. We then turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. Each game runs at high detail or the highest available settings (Extreme for Call of Duty, Overdrive for Cyberpunk 2077, and Ultra High for F1 24).
The Call of Duty benchmark, though run at the highest setting, aims to show high frame rates in a competitive esports title to evaluate compatibility with fast displays. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push a gaming PC to the limit, so we run it on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 represents our test of DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems), demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies.
These tests show some clear power stratification, but it’s all logical. The two RTX 5090 systems were markedly superior to this RTX 5080 desktop, which in turn traded blows with the RTX 4090 system and beat out the RTX 4080 desktop. In the synthetic-test scenarios, if I’m being critical, I maybe would’ve expected a bit more out of the Area-51 given its size and parts, but I think this just underscores the differences among the GPUs more than anything. It’s undoubtedly an upgrade over its last-generation RTX 4080 counterpart.
Looking more closely at the real-world game tests, the Area-51 posted steady high frame rates. As expected, the RTX 5090 pushed much faster frame rates, particularly at 4K, but the Area-51 was more than capable at 1440p. These frame rates suit 60fps-plus AAA gaming and multiplayer titles at high settings. All but the esports crowd will be looking toward playing at the higher resolutions with a PC this costly, and in two of the games tested, hitting 60fps is possible even at 4K. Cyberpunk 2077 (at maximum settings and without the help of DLSS) is too demanding at 4K, and this system failed to reach 60fps at 1440p, too.
That’s, of course, where DLSS 4 will come into play on RTX 50-series systems. I’ll refrain from extensive testing of Nvidia’s upscaling technology on this particular PC—we’ve already run separate in-depth testing—but you can expect significant upticks in frame rates, especially with Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) active.
DLSS 4 will be the magic sauce for playing current titles, in games that support it, at high frame rates and resolutions. The tool’s MFG feature inserts multiple artificially generated frames between rendered frames to boost frame rates even higher. Depending on some of these settings and your subjective feelings about the output, you’ll notice some quality or visual concessions. Some gamers may prefer traditionally rendered frames only, but gaming at these settings on pure GPU rasterization will be difficult short of buying an RTX 5090 for $2,000 or more.
