CUDA Cores
NVIDIA's term for the parallel processing units in their GPUs. More CUDA cores generally means more rendering and compute power. AMD's equivalent are Stream Processors.
What are CUDA cores?
CUDA cores are the fundamental processing units inside NVIDIA GPUs. Each CUDA core can execute one floating-point or integer operation per clock cycle. The RTX 5090 has 21,760 CUDA cores; the RTX 5070 has 6,144. More cores = more parallel processing power for rendering, compute, and AI tasks.
AMD equivalent: AMD calls their units Stream Processors (or Compute Units in architecture terms). The numbers aren't directly comparable — a single RDNA 4 Stream Processor doesn't equal one CUDA core because the architectures handle work differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do more CUDA cores mean better performance?
Within the same generation, generally yes. But across generations, architectural improvements mean fewer newer cores can outperform more older cores. The RTX 5070's 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores outperform the RTX 3090's 10,496 Ampere cores because each Blackwell core does more work per cycle.