All New Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review

Image: Nvidia

 The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is now available, and without a doubt, it lives up to many of the lofty promises made by Nvidia before its release. It offers astounding generation-on-generation performance improvements that are closer to a revolution than an upgrade.

Despite this, you won't see performance increases of four times over here, and you'll only occasionally see a two-fold improvement over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, let alone the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Instead, you can anticipate an overall improvement of 50% to 70% in synthetic and gaming performance, with very few exceptions where the GPU outperforms the CPU.

This graphics card was built for rendering, easily outperforming the RTX 3090 in Blender Cycles performance, making it the greatest graphics card for creatives available today.

This graphics card, which demonstrates the maturity of Nvidia's third-generation ray-tracing cores, is the first to give entirely native 4K ray-traced gaming performance at a playable framerate without the need for DLSS.

Considerably more impressive, Nvidia's latest DLSS 3, which offers significantly faster framerates than the already ground-breaking DLSS 2.0, shows even more promise. Furthermore, even while we did not test DLSS 3 as thoroughly as we tested the RTX 4090's native hardware (for reasons we'll explain in a moment), based on what we have observed, Nvidia's new technology is likely a more significant advancement than anything relating to the hardware.

The card does require more power than its predecessor did, and when coupled with a processor like the Intel Core i9-12900K, you'll be drawing up to 700W from just these two parts. Even worse, to utilise this additional power draw effectively, cable management must be highly strategic, making it difficult for many builders to display this card in a case with a mass of PCIe wires.

Although the cost has gone up from its predecessor, the RTX 4090 still offers more performance for the money than any other graphics card on the market besides the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti given its incredible performance and the cost of the previous graphics card champion, the RTX 3090 Ti. The Nvidia RTX 4090 is therefore a pretty costly card, but if you can afford it, what you receive for the price makes it a very attractive value proposition.

Since the degree of power offered here is truly overkill for the great majority of people who will ever consider purchasing it, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is unquestionably an enthusiast graphics card in terms of both price and performance. 

The RTX 4090 was always going to be a card for early adopters out there, and it will pretty much give you everything you could want in an enthusiast graphics card. However, I'd definitely argue that the upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 is likely to be the much better purchase for gamers — and even the majority of creatives out there.

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090: PRICE & AVAILABILITY

MRP is listed at $1,599 (roughly £1,360, AU$2,300).
When will it be released? On October 12, 2022.
You can purchase it in the US, UK, and Australia.

On October 12, 2022, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 will be available for purchase in all countries, with a US MSRP of $1,599 (about £1,360/AU$2,300).

This is around $400 less than the MSRP of the RTX 3090 Ti, however, the latter's price has decreased significantly since the RTX 4090 was announced. This is $100 higher than the MSRP of the RTX 3090 when it was introduced in September 2020.

The price of this card is undeniably high, but it is intended more for creative professionals than for the average consumer, fitting into the prosumer middle ground between the greatest gaming PC and a Pixar workstation.

Naturally, third-party versions of the RTX 4090 will be more expensive, and demand for this card is likely to drive up the price significantly at launch. However, due to the collapse of the crypto bubble, we don't believe prices will increase as dramatically as they did for the previous generation of graphics cards.

Finally, it should be noted that even though this graphics card is expensive, its performance is so much better than that of cards with comparable prices that it offers a much better price-to-performance value than just about any other card out there. In this regard, it is far superior to its direct predecessors. 

One of the biggest surprises from our testing was undoubtedly the price-to-performance ratio, which is something we really only see in the best inexpensive graphics cards.

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090: FEATURE & CHIPSET

Image: Future

The new Nvidia Lovelace architecture, which powers the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, has brought forth some significant hardware generational advances. For starters, the Nvidia Ampere GeForce cards employ the Samsung 8nm node, whilst the AD102 GPU uses the 4nm TSMC node.

Because of the TSMC node, Nvidia was able to fit 76.3 billion transistors onto the AD102 die, a 169% increase in transistor count over the GA102's 28.3 billion, which has a die size of 628mm2, the same as the GA102 GPU in the RTX 3090.

The RTX 4090's base clock runs at a quick 2,235 MHz, compared to the RTX 3090's 1,395 MHz, therefore there has also been a significant increase in clock speeds. Its boost clock also experiences a comparable increase, going from 1,695 MHz to 2,520 MHz.

The RTX 4090 has a faster effective memory speed of 21.2 Gbps compared to the RTX 3090's 19.5 Gbps because its memory clock is also slightly faster at 1,325 MHz, up from 1,219 MHz. Due to this, the RTX 4090 can utilise its 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM more effectively than the RTX 3090.

The RTX 4090 has roughly 6,000 more CUDA cores than the RTX 3090 because it has 128 streaming multiprocessors instead of 82, or 56% more cores (16,384 to 10,496). This also implies that the RTX 4090 has 46 more ray tracing cores and 184 more Tensor cores, all of which are next-generation cores, making them even more effective at ray tracing and vectorized computations than its predecessor.

This is notably clear when running DLSS 3, which makes the transition to full-frame rendering rather than just the pixel rendering performed by prior incarnations of DLSS, and when turning up ray tracing to the maximum in games like Cyberpunk 2077.

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090: DESIGN

Image: Future

There are some slight and not-so-subtle differences between the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition and its predecessor, although they are not overly noticeable. Let's start by saying that this card is heavier than previous ones, so don't be surprised if we start including support brackets in our PC setups. With the Nvidia RTX 4090, it may have been optional in the previous generation but is now an absolute need.

Although manufacturers are already starting to offer them separately and third-party cards are likely to incorporate them, the Founders Edition does not come with one, therefore we strongly advise that you buy one up.

Otherwise, there aren't many differences between the RTX 4090s and RTX 3090's size. Since it is both a little bit shorter and a little bit thicker than the RTX 3090, it can probably fit in the same case as the RTX 3090 FE.

Given the additional power being pulled into the GPU, the fans on either side of the card do a respectable job of moving air through the heatsink to cool the GPU.

About power, the RTX 4090 uses a brand-new 16-pin connector that must be powered by four 8-pin connectors linked into an adaptor. This shouldn't come as a surprise given the card's 450W TDP, however, using this type of adapter in your situation will probably be a nightmare. We strongly advise you to check into the new power supply units (PSUs) that are entering the market and support this new connector without the need for an adaptor. You might as well go all out and simplify your life and cable management if you're going to spend this much money on a new graphics card.

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090: PERFORMANCE

Image: Future

About power, the RTX 4090 uses a brand-new 16-pin connector that must be powered by four 8-pin connectors linked into an adaptor. This shouldn't come as a surprise given the card's 450W TDP, however, using this type of adapter in your situation will probably be a nightmare. We strongly advise you to check into the new power supply units (PSUs) that are entering the market and support this new connector without the need for an adaptor. You might as well go all out and simplify your life and cable management if you're going to spend this much money on a new graphics card.

Image: Future

The Nvidia RTX 4090 produced startling results across all of our synthetic benchmark tests, notably on more recent and sophisticated benchmarks like 3DMark Port Royal and Time Spy Extreme, occasionally entirely outpacing the RTX 3090 and outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti very much everywhere.

Image: Future

The Nvidia RTX 4090's Blender performance is particularly noteworthy for more than doubling the RTX 3090 Ti's performance on two out of three tests and outperforming any other rival 4K graphics card in Cycles rendering as this trend carries on to the GPU-intensive creative benchmarks.

PugetBench for Premiere Pro measures full system performance rather than just isolating the GPU, and Adobe Photoshop is a heavily raterized workload, which is something that AMD has an advantage in over the past couple of generations, as we can see pretty clearly in our tests. The RTX 4090 performs noticeably better than the RTX 3090 Ti in Premiere Pro, but the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as it might be.

Image: Future

Our tests confirm that the RTX 4090 will provide some of the biggest performance improvements for gaming. The majority of gaming benchmarks demonstrate a 90%–100% increase in framerates for the RTX 4090 over the RTX 3090 and a 55%–75% improvement in performance over the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti.

Image: Future

When you consider DLSS 3, these statistics are probably going to increase even further. Although DLSS 3 hasn't yet been included in any commercially accessible titles, we were able to try it out on a few exclusive builds of games that will be released soon after the RTX 4090. On Nvidia's FrameView tool, we were able to use in-game benchmarks from a handful of these titles to measure how well DLSS 3 performed in comparison to current Steam builds with DLSS 2.0. The findings showed that certain games performed two to three times better using DLSS 3 than we did.

We can't necessarily proclaim these findings indicative because we used customised builds and Nvidia-provided tools. However, by simply looking at the benchmark demos themselves, it is clear that DLSS 3 outperforms DLSS 2.0 in terms of framerates.

As much as DLSS 2.0 transformed the performance of the finest PC games, DLSS 3 looks to be just as game-changing once it is adopted by developers across the PC gaming landscape. It is unknown whether the two to three-times greater performance will endure after its official release. It goes without saying that AMD must improve its upscaling skills if it ever wants to compete in the high-end 4K market.

There are diminishing returns, so it's debatable if the majority of players will ever require anything even close to this level of performance. Since DLSS can provide nearly the same experience as an RTX 3090 or even an RTX 3080 Ti, some consumers may find the native 4K ray tracing to be neat but somewhat superfluous. However, that is a decision that will have to be made by each individual consumer.

Although I personally believe this card is at least on the verge of being overkill, there is no denying that it overkills those frame rates unlike any other.