NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell Availability

[ILikeFeet]

Looking at some benchmarks from the latest releases it is interessing that more advanced engines cant scale anymore on pure compute and bandwith powerhouses.
UE5 and AC: Shadows are a great example of how advancing forward do not come with more efficiency. Older games or games with lower quality run much better on Blackwell like Atomfall:

Atomfall Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

Powered by the latest version of the Asura Engine, it's time now to benchmark Atomfall and examine its performance on PC.

www.dsogaming.com

The 5090 is more than twice as fast as the 9070XT. The same is true for UE5 game South of Midnight which doesnt use Lumen and Nanite: https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-perfor...-midnight-benchmarks-pc-performance-analysis/

But when you look at The Talos Principle Reawakened with Lumen and RT-Lumen the performance on Blackwell is abnormal: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/The-...ened-Test-Release-Preis-Benchmarks-1470097/2/

Power consumption is under 350W on my 5090 OC. For example i get over 500W in Guardians of the Galaxy with Raytracing in 1440p. There is really something broken in UE5 and other engines.

slight correction, South of Midnight is Unreal Engine 4.27

 

[DegustatoR]

Smartphones and computers are among many tech devices and components that will be exempted from reciprocal tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, according to new guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The guidance also includes exclusions for other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells, flat panel TV displays, flash drives, and memory cards.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/12/trump-exempts-phones-computers-chips-tariffs-apple-dell.html

So no reasons to buy GPUs now because they'll become more expensive due to tariffs later then?

 

[DegustatoR]

But when you look at The Talos Principle Reawakened with Lumen and RT-Lumen the performance on Blackwell is abnormal

So yeah this one is weird:

https://en.gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/the-talos-principle-reawakened-test-gpu-cpu

Everything seem to scale about as you'd expect - with two big exceptions being RDNA4 and Blackwell with the former outperforming its usual self while the latter underperforming for whatever reason.
5070Ti is generally within 2% from 4080S and here it's up to 10% behind (the gap is bigger in 4K which makes no sense to me).
9070 non-XT on the the other hand is beating the 7970XT here by some 5% while usually it's some 2% slower.
RDNA3 vs Ada seem to be as you'd expect though, RDNA2 vs Ampere also seems normal.
No idea what's going on with Blackwell in this title. It certainly isn't a problem of "scaling" the performance as such scaling happens just fine on the previous GeForce generation.

 

[troyan]

Not that interesting really. More complex graphics is more shading limited while less complex graphics is more memory bandwidth limited. Which means that more complex graphics tend to be limited by math flops while less complex graphics will be limited by GB/s.

AC Shadows is a weird one though, no idea what this one is limited by but it does underperform on Nvidia h/w in general. Same is probably true with TPP remake.

I dont see that modern engines are math limited. Going from Ampere to Blackwell there is more from everything but modern engines do not scale.
Compute performance is the best way to spend transistors. But game engines are so inefficient that they cant use the compute performance at all. And there are engines like UE5 who do lightning in a way which introduces overhead and underutilization. Pathtracing games scale better than UE5 games. And i remember a time when people said that raytracing is a GPU unfriendly workload.

For nVidia it is just better to use wafers for other markets.

 

[DegustatoR]

Going from Ampere to Blackwell there is more from everything but modern engines do not scale.

Most of them scale fine. Exceptions always exist but they have themselves to blame for that usually.

 

[arandomguy]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/12/trump-exempts-phones-computers-chips-tariffs-apple-dell.html

So no reasons to buy GPUs now because they'll become more expensive due to tariffs later then?

The situation is very fluid but the overarching direction being communicated hasn't actually changed.

"All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels -- we need to have these things made in America. We can't be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us," Lutnick told "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

He continued, "So what [President Donald Trump's] doing is he's saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon."

Commerce Secretary Lutnick says tariff exemptions for electronics are only temporary

Lutnick said on "This Week" administration's exemptions on electronic devices from tariffs is temporary, with "semiconductor tariffs" likely come in "a month or two."

abcnews.go.com

I'm just going to say it's the same overall problem for the GPU since crypto/covid. There's a lot of extenuating factors influencing supply and demand that can change quickly. As such you're taking a risk effectively either way, buy later and risk higher prices, buy now and risk prices dropping. This the problem basically, GPU prices haven't been stable and predictable since 2020.