ASUS GeForce RTX 5090 Astral OC Review – Astronomical Premium

Introduction

We have with us the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 OC graphics card, which debuts the new ROG Astral brand for ASUS. Designed to provide the best of ASUS thermal engineering and industrial design, the ROG Astral brand is positioned a notch above the ROG Strix brand, providing the company’s best air cooling solution, a premium set of materials, and the new Quad Fan Force arrangement of no less than four fans. Aesthetically, ROG Astral graphics cards pair well not just with ASUS ROG Strix series motherboards, but also the more premium ROG Maximus and ROG Crosshair lines. The GeForce RTX 5090 is designed to crunch through any of today and tomorrow’s games with maxed out settings, at 4K Ultra HD.

The Blackwell graphics architecture powering the RTX 5090 introduces neural rendering, a breakthrough new concept where generative AI works more collaboratively with classic raster 3D graphics. You’ve had a taste of generative AI, and its ability to conjure up photorealistic images and videos. Now imagine AI drawing parts of your 3D scene in real time, complete with geometric detail and ray tracing effects. Making this possible is API-level standardization that allows games to access Tensor cores, and the ability for the GPU to accelerate a generative AI model and render games in tandem, thanks to a new hardware scheduling component called AMP.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about Blackwell is that GPUs in its generation do not introduce a new foundry node, all chips in the RTX 50-series are built on the existing TSMC 4N process, which is an NVIDIA-specific variant of the 5 nm EUV node. Whatever generational improvements in efficiency you see are purely thanks to advances made by the graphics architecture itself, and a re-architected power management system.

The RTX 5090 is based on the GB202 ASIC, a massive 750 mm² slab of silicon featuring over 92 billion transistors, 192 Blackwell streaming multiprocessors, a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 interface, and a mammoth 512-bit GDDR7 memory interface, belting out 1.79 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The trend across the RTX 50-series is large increases in bandwidth thanks to GDDR7, because neural rendering and the new DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation are memory sensitive technologies. The RTX 5090 is carved out of the GB202 by enabling 170 out of those 192 SM, and enabling 96 MB out of the 128 MB on-die L2 cache available. This results in 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 Tensor cores, and 170 RT cores, across 11 GPCs, and this doesn’t even max out the GB202. The card comes with 32 GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory.

The Blackwell graphics architecture introduces a new generation streaming multiprocessor with concurrent FP32 and INT32 capability across all its 128 CUDA cores, shader execution reordering with awareness for neural shaders, and the new 5th Gen Tensor core that’s capable of FP4 data formats for 32x the throughput of the original Tensor core. The new generation RT core has the hardware groundwork for Mega Geometry, the ability to give ray traced object significantly higher poly counts, or those many triangles onto which rays should interact with. DLSS Multi Frame Generation is a technology that uses AI to predict not just every other frame following a conventionally rendered one, but up to three frames following it, effectively quadrupling frame-rates (or at least the smoothness of output).

The ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC doesn’t just come with a heavy cooling solution that fits into the dimensions of the previous generation RTX 40-series ROG Strix graphics cards, but also dials things up a notch with the introduction of a fourth fan arranged along the tail end of the backplate where you normally expect a cutout to be, for airflow from the third fan to go through. This fourth fan acts as a “pull” fan, increasing the overall airflow volume of the heatsink by around 20%. There’s plenty of tastefully executed dual-tone surfaces, rich metal alloy textures, and ARGB LED lighting. Innovations you expect from ROG Strix series cards are also here, such as dual-BIOS, case fan headers, and ARGB headers. ASUS is giving the RTX 5090 a factory overclock of 2580 MHz compared to the 2410 MHz reference GPU Boost frequency. The cooling solution is tasked with ensuring higher boost frequency residency and lower noise. Since this is the company’s most premium air-cooled custom design RTX 5090, ASUS is pricing it at USD $2,800, an astounding 40% premium over the NVIDIA baseline price.