RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090 - GPU Benchmark Comparison

Direct performance comparison between the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 across 21 standardized AI benchmarks collected from our production fleet. Testing shows the RTX 4090 winning 3 out of 21 benchmarks (14% win rate), while the RTX 5090 wins 18 tests. All 21 benchmark results are automatically gathered from active rental servers, providing real-world performance data rather than synthetic testing.

LLM Inference Performance: RTX 4090 23% slower

In language model inference testing across 9 different models, the RTX 4090 is 23% slower than the RTX 5090 on average. For deepseek-r1:32b inference, the RTX 4090 reaches 45 tokens/s while the RTX 5090 achieves 71 tokens/s, making the RTX 4090 significantly slower with a 37% deficit. Overall, the RTX 4090 wins 1 out of 9 LLM tests with an average 28% performance difference, making the RTX 5090 the better option for LLM inference tasks.

Image Generation Performance: RTX 4090 39% slower

Evaluating AI image generation across 12 different Stable Diffusion models, the RTX 4090 is 39% slower than the RTX 5090 in this category. When testing sd3.5-large, the RTX 4090 completes generations at 53 s/image while the RTX 5090 achieves 12 s/image, making the RTX 4090 substantially slower with a 78% deficit. Across all 12 image generation benchmarks, the RTX 4090 wins 2 tests with an average 39% performance difference, making the RTX 5090 the better choice for Stable Diffusion, SDXL, and Flux workloads.

About These Benchmarks of RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090

Our benchmarks are collected automatically from servers having gpus of type RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 in our fleet using standardized test suites:

LLM Inference (Ollama & VLLM): Measures tokens per second of RTX 4090 compared to RTX 5090 for LLM inference using various models (Llama, Qwen, etc.) on both Ollama and VLLM with FP8 quantization
Image Generation: Measures images per minute and seconds per image for AI image generation on the RTX 4090 compared to RTX 5090
CPU: Single-core and multi-core operations per second representing GPU Servers you can rent with RTX 4090 or RTX 5090
NVMe: Read and write speeds in MB/s for storage performance on GPU Servers typically equipped with RTX 4090 or RTX 5090

Note: RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 AI Benchmark Results may vary based on system load, configuration, and specific hardware revisions. These benchmarks represent median values from multiple test runs of RTX 4090 and RTX 5090.