Strange GeForce RTX 50-series benchmark issues solved but new problem for gamers arises

Recently, we have been reporting on the strange state of affairs for new graphics cards like the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 on the PassMark benchmark database. Despite both the units performing well in our thorough tests, the cards could not shake off their predecessors on this specific site. In fact, the RTX 5090 even fell below the RTX 4090 in terms of overall graphics benchmarking performance. However, the reason behind these shocking performance results has now been revealed on the X account for PassMark.

In a nutshell, it appears that Nvidia’s quiet removal of 32-bit support for the GeForce RTX 50 series shouldn’t have been so quiet. While 32-bit CUDA (Nvidia’s proprietary framework), and therefore 32-bit OpenCL (open-source framework), will still be supported on older generations of cards, it is “deprecated” for the Blackwell boards. While PassMark does state that its benchmark application PerformanceTest is 64-bit, compatibility issues will have caused SKUs like the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 to either not work or underperform. Ironically, the site does point out that they could not even get hold of an RTX 5090 of their own for testing directly.

While this news does provide a reason for why the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 were looking less-than-impressive against the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 here, and that a future patch from PassMark should allow the Blackwell cards to improve on their results, sadly that is where the silver lining of the cloud ends. As pointed out in the X post embedded below this article, the software layer support being removed doesn’t explain why the RTX 5090 falls behind the RTX 4090 in the DirectX 9 test, although the sample size of 70 vs. 14,521, respectively, is disparate to say the least.

In addition, although this is good news for RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 owners who care more about benchmarks, it might be bad news for owners who just care about gaming. Because of the change in support, gamers have been reporting that they are now buying older cards just to make sure they can play titles that rely on 32-bit PhysX. For example, a redditor called u/jerubedo is using an RTX 3050 (Asus OC Edition available on Amazon) alongside an RTX 5090 to overcome potential software support issues: Among several game tests, they found that running Batman Arkham Asylum at max settings without the RTX 3050 delivered 61 FPS while utilizing the older Ampere card boosted the performance to 390 FPS.