There is an alternative 2025 where you get the Nvidia RTX 5090 of your dreams. That's a timeline where Nvidia has busted Apple's grip on TSMC's most advanced process nodes, managed to negotiate an unprecedented deal on silicon production, and worked some magic to deliver the same sort of generational rendering performance increases we've become used to since the RTX prefix was born.
And it's a 2025 where Nvidia hasn't slapped a $400 price hike on the most powerful of its new RTX Blackwell graphics cards. But in this timeline, the RTX 5090 is an ultra enthusiast graphics card that is begging us to be more realistic.
Which, I will freely admit, sounds kinda odd from what has always been an OTT card. But, in the real world, a GB202 GPU running on a more advanced, smaller process node, with far more CUDA cores, would have cost a whole lot more than the $1,999 the green team is asking for this new card.
And would still maybe only get you another 10–20% higher performance for the money—I mean, how much different is TSMC's 3 nm node to its 4 nm ones?
The RTX 5090 is a new kind of graphics card, however, in terms of ethos if not in silicon. It's a GPU designed for a new future of AI processing, and I don't just mean it's really good at generating pictures of astronauts riding horses above the surface of the moon: AI processing is built into its core design and that's how you get a gaming performance boost that is almost unprecedented in modern PC graphics, even when the core at its heart hasn't changed that much.