If you thought your 4K gaming setup was pretty hardcore, then be prepared to eat humble pie, as Nvidia has demonstrated that 5K (5,120 x 2,880) gaming is not only possible on the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, but you can even manage it in demanding titles such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I had a chance to play the game with DLSS 4 at CES, and was surprised by not only the sharpness of the image, but also the smoothness of the frame rate.
The Indiana Jones and the Great Circle system requirements are about as demanding as you can get, with ray tracing enabled on all settings, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 required to run the game maxed out with full path tracing enabled. However, thanks to some magic from DLSS 4 Multi Frame Gen, you can play the game at over 200fps on a 5K monitor, using the new RTX 5090.
Of course, there are some major caveats here. One is that while the HUD and menus were running at 5K, the effective resolution of the game was actually 2,560 x 1,440, as it was using DLSS Super Resolution on the aggressive Performance setting. However, thanks to some help from the new Transformer model used in DLSS 4, the image was still surprisingly sharp, with Nvidiaβs new AI tech seemingly being able to do a much better job of upscaling than previous versions of DLSS.
The game was also, of course, using Nvidiaβs new Multi Frame Gen tech, and interestingly this wasnβt integrated into the game itself at this point. Instead, you had to force on Multi Frame Gen using the Nvidia App, but it worked incredibly well. In the image above, for example, you can see that the game is running at 5K at 211fps with path tracing enabled.
Every single one of the written labels in the cabinet was legible at a normal eye distance from the screen, with DLSS Super Resolution now able to upscale a decent amount of detail without it looking blurry and noisy. Iβve zoomed in on one of the labels in the image above, from the same distance away from the cabinet as in the top image, and bear in mind that this is a photo rather than a screenshot, so it will be sharper on-screen.
In motion, the frame rate was also pleasingly smooth, with the ray-traced sunshine coming through the windows affecting various areas of the scene, and there wasnβt a hint of any of the glitches you might expect from generating multiple frames with AI.
In a cinematic, gorgeous-looking game such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, DLSS 4 is clearly a killer feature for the RTX 5090. This was just one scene in one game, though, and Nvidia is going to have to hope that many more games enable Multi Frame Gen in the near future. The company has already admitted that the RTX 5090 is only 30% faster than the 4090 in games without DLSS 4, so Multi Frame Gen is going to need wide game support if Nvidia expects gamers to spend $1,999 on it.
In the meantime, if youβre looking to buy a new GPU now, check out our best graphics card guide, where we take you through all our recommended options right now, to suit a range of budgets, and see our guide to the RTX 5080, as well as the RTX 5070, to see what other Nvidia GPUs will be out shortly.
