It’s been a long time since I could start reviewing a graphics card without the caveat that global supply issues, semiconductor shortages, and the cryptocurrency boom have made it almost irrelevant because most people won’t be able to find it in stores or even afford it. But NVIDIA’s next generation of powerful graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 4090, is coming at a time when these issues are largely behind us, and we can get back to admiring ridiculously high frame rates at high, but not outrageous, prices. It’s nice! I’ve spent the last week putting the RTX 4090 Founders Edition to the test, testing performance in both synthetic benchmarks and real games. It’s a big model, and it comes with an even bigger $1,599 price tag. True, when we’re talking about a gaming monster capable of running something like Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K (with ray tracing) and a frame rate that can really take advantage of a 144Hz monitor, it’s hard to argue that such hardware isn’t worth every penny.
Design and features
First of all, consider the elephant in the room – the huge RTX 4090. This is a massive graphics card, about the same size as the 3090 Ti that preceded it. The new three-slot video card weighs just over five and a half kilograms. But it’s big and beautiful, with the same silver and black color scheme that debuted on NVIDIA 30-series cards two years ago.
NVIDIA engineers have come up with an impressive spec, even compared to the still stunning RTX 3090 Ti. It features 16,384 CUDA cores, compared to 10,752 for the RTX 3090 Ti. Its base clock speed is 2.23 GHz, which rises to 2.52 GHz, and the amount of GDDR6 VRAM is 24 GB, which makes the new product capable of processing power of 83 shader teraflops, compared to 40 for the 3090 Ti; 1321 tensor teraflops vs 320; 191 teraflops in ray tracing versus 78.
These are all huge leaps. However, as we’ve seen many times before, simply doubling the number of cores or shaders doesn’t automatically increase gaming performance. However, in this case, NVIDIA has achieved significant results, and the improvements that I saw in most of my tests are definitely more significant than just a performance increase. This is truly a generational leap forward.
With great power comes great heat, but NVIDIA has made strides in cooler design as well. From the outside, everything looks basically the same. It’s a similar dual axle design we’ve seen in the last generation, with a large overlap heatsink. This allows the rear fan to blow straight and blow hot air up and out of the case. This time, NVIDIA opted for larger liquid bearing fans to increase airflow and reduce noise levels. The space between the fins has also been optimized to increase airflow by 15%. We were impressed with this design when it debuted on Series 30. It worked well then and it works the same way now. In our testing, the RTX 4090 peaked at 64.7°C, which is impressive for such a high-end card that uses an OEM cooler.
Assembly for testing
- Motherboard: Z390, ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme.
- Processor: Intel Core i9-9900K (stock), Corsair H115i PRO RGB 280mm AIO cooler.
- RAM: 32 GB, Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200.
- Storage: 1TB Samsung EVO Plus NVMe SSD.
- Power supply: 1200 W, Corsair HX1200.
Synthetic tests
Starting with synthetic benchmarks, the RTX 4090 didn’t just surprise, it truly stunned. In 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, the video card showed an amazing result – 21,872 points. Looking ahead, that’s 50% more than the RX 6950 XT’s score of 14,512, the best we’ve recorded so far. This value roughly corresponds to the previous overclocking world record in Fire Strike Ultra of not one, but two GPUs at once.
Unigine Heaven demonstrates the same, with the RTX 4090 outperforming every card we’ve ever tested with a 26% improvement at 1080p, 39% at 1440p and 31% at 4K over the 3090 Ti.
The ray tracing synthetic test continues this trend, with the RTX 4090 nearly doubling, and in some cases actually doubling, the 3090 Ti’s results. These are very impressive numbers.
Game performance
Moving on to our gaming benchmarks, the RTX 4090 continues to dominate. Our standard test suite consists of four games: Borderlands 3, Gears Tactics, Metro Exodus, and Total War: Three Kingdoms. All tests are run at maximum graphics settings, with ray tracing and DLSS enabled if available.
As in synthetic benchmarks, the RTX 4090 is well ahead of every other card we’ve tested across all games and resolutions. Of course, that’s how it should be. It’s a top-of-the-line next-generation card, so only the 3090 Ti, which is a semi-step upgrade from its predecessor, should stand a chance of remaining competitive with the new card.
The question is, how big is the advantage of the RTX 4090? Looking at a wider selection of games in 4K resolution, the new product has a significant advantage over the 3090 Ti, ranging from a 14% improvement in Metro Exodus to a 90% advantage in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This means a frame rate of around 100 FPS or higher – remember, this is at 4K, max settings, with ray tracing enabled. Again, these are very impressive numbers.
DLSS 3
The success of the RTX 4090 is undoubtedly due to NVIDIA’s continuous improvement of the DLSS option. It’s an AI-enabled technology that allows games to render at a lower resolution, in this case 1440p, but still output 4K with a visual quality that’s almost indistinguishable from native 4K. Early versions of DLSS had some sacrifices in terms of fidelity due to the magic of AI upsampling under the hood, but the technology has since improved to the point where games look just as good (if not better) than when you don’t use DLSS.
The latest version, DLSS 3, is exclusive to 40-series cards, but it introduces a new feature that literally generates frames on its own. There’s an extremely technical explanation on NVIDIA’s site if you’re interested, but in short: the GPU analyzes two consecutive frames, calculates the difference between them, and then uses its AI to create an extra frame in between.
This is a massive improvement over the last generation and can completely change your FPS performance. While DLSS 2 used motion vector data and individual frames to intelligently scale the image and improve performance, the RTX 4090 optical flow accelerator detects motion paths and creates new frames on its own, separate from the game engine’s own frames. It works in tandem with NVIDIA Reflex to eliminate any lag that can make a game feel glitchy. According to the developers, DLSS 3 can provide up to 4 times higher FPS.
When testing Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution with max settings including ray tracing, I saw significant gains with DLSS over no DLSS, and even more with frame generation enabled. With DLSS disabled, the heroine of this review showed 41.9 FPS in the game minute benchmark. With DLSS enabled but frame generation disabled, the result jumped to 84 FPS. With frame generation turned on… an incredible 136 FPS, while the picture looked just great.
However, frame generation has a small drawback: as the GPU creates additional frames, it introduces a small delay when inserting these frames into the stream. Keep in mind that these frames are generated by the GPU outside of the game engine, which can make DLSS 3 potentially look like 120fps but feel like 60fps. But fear not: NVIDIA Reflex compensates for this delay and more. In fact, in the part of Cyberpunk that I played with frame generation turned on, the additional delay was not noticeable. But the situation may not be the same in other games, and it may be more problematic in fast-paced sports games where every millisecond counts. Still, a game as visually demanding as Cyberpunk (in 4K, ray-traced, and over 120 FPS) is truly impressive.
Another point to keep in mind is the rather high system requirements recommended by NVIDIA for the RTX 4090. To unleash the potential of the GPU, the developers advise using the latest processor and DDR5 memory. Also requires DirectX 12, GPU scheduling hardware acceleration. It’s also incompatible with v-sync (but G-Sync is fine).
Review
The RTX 4090 may be huge and expensive, but its lead over all possible competitors is simply huge. It’s a bit unfair that it’s the only new generation card available right now, so we can only compare it to its predecessors. But until the rest catch up with its impressive hardware specs and AI in DLSS 3 technology, even the $1,599 price tag doesn’t seem outrageous given the unbeatable frame rates this card can deliver.
This is a translation of the IGN review.
Source: Trash Box
I am Joyce Corbett and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. My current role is as an author at World Stock Market, where I focus primarily on the tech section. My specialty is creating engaging content that helps to explain and demystify complex financial topics.
