A new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 leak suggests the base clock speed of the upcoming card will be 2.9GHz, which makes for a huge 600MHz increase over the current RTX 4090. That base clock frequency is a guaranteed minimum in games, suggesting that the card will be able to deliver at least that speed at all times.
This all ties into previous RTX 5090 rumors, which have suggested the new Nvidia GPU will provide a significant uptick in performance over the current best graphics card, the RTX 4090.
The leak comes from a discussion on the Chiphell forum (via a post on Videocardz). In reply to another post talking about GPU clock speeds, forum user, Panzerlied (who has form for previous GPU tech leaks), states that “the base frequency of 5090 is almost 2.9G.”
As well as being roughly 600MHz faster than the RTX 4090’s 2,235MHz base clock speed, this also comfortably beats any other GPU currently on the market, with most of Nvidia’s GPUs hovering around the 2-2.5GHz mark. Even AMD’s fastest-clocked GPU, the RX 7600 XT, only hits 2.755MHz.
While this base clock speed should mean the RTX 5090 can continually tick along at a fast rate, we’d also expect it to be able to boost its clock speed to an even higher level. The RTX 4090’s boost clock is 2,580MHz, so if the same base-to-boost increase is applied to the RTX 5090, it could hit 3,245MHz.
The RTX 5090 is expected to use the same Blackwell GB202 GPU featured in Nvidia’s latest top-tier AI server chips, but with slightly more of the GPU’s cores and other internal features disabled. In one recent Blackwell leak, the suggested total number of streaming multiprocessors (SMs) of the RTX 5090 will be 192, which is a massive increase over the 126 SMs of the RTX 4090.
Ultimately, it’s no great surprise that the RTX 5090 is shaping up to be a monstrously powerful GPU. After all, the RTX 4090 is already a performance beast, and the RTX 5090, by definition, has to be at least a little bit faster. We’ll still have to wait and see just exactly how it will shape up in terms of overall gaming performance increase, power efficiency, and value, however.
In the meantime, you can read more about how Nvidia’s latest frame rate and image quality-boosting software tech in our DLSS guide, with all its current and future GPUs set to support these features.