While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.
NVIDIA kindly sent over a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card for Linux review and benchmarking at Phoronix. The Linux driver support isn’t quite ready yet but will be ready by the retail availability of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards on 30 January.
On Thursday though a Phoronix reader advised that there is an early NVIDIA R570 Linux driver build already included as part of the latest CUDA 12.8 packages. Sure enough, trying out that NVIDIA 570.86.10 build had worked out with the GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card on Ubuntu Linux. But NVIDIA has advised against using that CUDA-packaged driver build for any RTX 5090 / Blackwell testing. For graphics/gaming workloads they recommend waiting until the official Linux driver is published at the end of the month. So for today is solely looking at the GeForce RTX 5090 Linux performance from the GPU compute angle with various CUDA/OptiX rendering and CUDA/OpenCL benchmarks.
Due to many of the benchmarks being NVIDIA/CUDA-only, this comparison article is simply looking at the generational performance of the GeForce RTX 5090 compared to prior generation Turing, Ampere, and Ada graphics cards. The prior NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were all re-tested in recent days on the latest NVIDIA 565.77 driver while the GeForce RTX 5090 was run using the NVIDIA 570.86.10 driver build found within the CUDA 12.8 package.
The graphics cards tested for this NVIDIA GPU compute comparison included:
– RTX 2070
– RTX 2070 SUPER
– RTX 2080
– RTX 2080 SUPER
– RTX 2080 Ti
– TITAN RTX
– RTX 3070
– RTX 3070 Ti
– RTX 3080
– RTX 3090
– RTX 4070
– RTX 4070 SUPER
– RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
– RTX 4080
– RTX 4080 SUPER
– RTX 4090
– RTX 5090
Thus the upper-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards of each generation going back to the RTX 20 Turing series.
Across the variety of compute workloads tested so far on the NVIDIA 570.86.10 Linux driver with the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card, it’s been running very well and without issue. The performance and power? Let’s look at those benchmarks.
