However, we can now say it might very well be true after testing and evaluating our first new card built using the Ada Lovelace architecture. Lovelace’s performance improvements are evident in Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition: If not the company’s single greatest generational performance jump, it’s very close. They are enormous. Although the $1,599 cost of the card may seem excessive, so is the mega-card. As long as you are playing relatively recent games at 4K resolution, there is currently nothing that even comes close to it. you can read our article on Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review.
Design
There are some subtle and not-so-subtle differences between the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition and its predecessor, but 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 builds. With the Nvidia RTX 4090, it may have been optional in the previous generation but is now an absolute requirement. Although manufacturers are already starting to sell them separately and third-party cards are likely to include them, the Founders Edition does not come with one, so we strongly advise that you pick one up. Otherwise, the RTX 4090’s dimensions aren’t all that different from the RTX 3090’s. 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. In relation to power, the RTX 4090 uses a brand-new 16-pin connector that must be powered by four 8-pin connectors plugged into an adaptor. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given the card’s 450W TDP, but using this type of adapter in your situation will probably be a nightmare. We strongly advise you to look into the new power supply units (PSUs) that are available today and support this new connector without the need for an adapter.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review: Features
The use of such a sizable cooler is justified. It’s a monster of a gaming card, the RTX 4090. It is built for high performance, and it does so abundantly. Similar to the Founders Edition, the Gaming OC has 24GB of lightning-fast GDDR6X video memory and 16,384 CUDA cores, which are the primary drivers of non-ray traced performance. This memory operates at 21Gbps over a 384-bit bus. That’s the same as the RTX 3090 Ti from the previous generation, but don’t let that fool you—this memory is incredibly quick. The Gaming OC is factory overclocked, as the name clearly states, but there is only a slight improvement over the Founders Edition. Its boost clock is 2535 MHz out of the box, which is a pitiful 15 MHz advantage. At 1313 MHz, the memory clocks are identical. Although it is an improvement, it won’t make your already excellent gaming experience noticeably superior to Nvidia’s reference card. These “side of the box” specifications are less significant in practice than they might initially appear to be. Performance is limited less by initial manufacturer modifications and more by power and thermal constraints because Nvidia’s GPU Boost technology intelligently ramps up all of its modern GPUs beyond these speeds. The Founders Edition is also excellent, but aftermarket cards typically have much better thermal solutions, giving AIBs a run for their money in terms of performance per dollar. It’s impressive to see the cooler here. The Windforce cooling system from Gigabyte is used by the Gaming OC. It is topped by three enormous 110mm fans, each of which has three fins to better direct airflow. Air turbulence is reduced by the middle fan rotating in opposition to the outer two. The card’s largest component, a massive heatsink covered in 10 copper heat pipes, is located underneath. To better channel heat into those copper pipes and out onto the fins where it can be expelled out the back, there is a vapour chamber directly above the GPU. It is essentially the same fantastic design we saw in the previous generation, only larger. It functions equally well, if not better.
Connectivity
The NVLink connector that was previously available with the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti boards has now been discontinued, but the other connectivity options are the same as what we’ve seen with Ampere cards in the past. One HDMI 2.1a port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs are available. also, you can learn our article on Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review. While AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX RDNA 3 cards already boast about having DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR 13.5 support, Nvidia believes that the market isn’t yet ready for DisplayPort 2.1. Back in the day, Turing cards supported USB Type-C, but Nvidia eliminated this port with Ampere. On the other hand, AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 cards will support USB Type-C for directly connecting VR headsets and USB-C monitors, which is a nice feature but not really a deal-breaker.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review: Gaming
Now for the juicy parts. We ran all of our tests on a Ryzen 9 7950X with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory on an outdoor test bench. Resizeable BAR (or Smart Access Memory for AMD GPUs) was left on throughout testing. The RTX 4090 is a monster physically, but it’s also a monster when it comes to 4K gaming performance. The RTX 4090 outperformed the RTX 3090 Ti by 68% across all of our test applications, with the exception of Bright Memory Infinite and Horizon Zero Dawn, for which we only have partial data. You’re looking at a boost of almost 89% over the RTX 3090.That’s a significant increase, much greater than the 30% increase we observed gen-on-gen with the introduction of the RTX 3080. All of those figures do not account for scaling. The RTX 4090 is demonstrating a significant advantage over the previous generation in terms of raw performance, which includes ray tracing. Cyberpunk 2077 made perhaps the most impressive showing. At 4K with the highest settings, the RTX 4090 is roughly 50% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, which is already impressive. But the RTX 4090 stands out for its ability to hit 60 frames per second (fps). Without help from Deep Learning Super Sampling, even the most powerful graphics cards from the previous generation struggled to reach 60 frames per second (DLSS). The RTX 4090 can do so with a significant lead while rendering every pixel.
Performance
So, we’ve reached the part of the review that really counts. Prior to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 announcement, there were rumours that the performance would increase by two times. Depending on the workload, these rumours were either close to the truth or accurate. The Nvidia RTX 4090 produced startling results across all of our synthetic benchmark tests, especially on more recent and sophisticated benchmarks like 3DMark Port Royal and Time Spy Extreme, occasionally fully outpacing the RTX 3090 and consistently outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti. 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 competing 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 rasterized 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. 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. also, you can check our article on Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review: Price
Conclusion
By releasing the RTX 4090 before well-liked cards like the RTX 4080 and below, Nvidia hopes to highlight the potential of its new Ada Lovelace architecture. In addition to significant increases in the number of CUDA cores, Tensor cores, and RT cores as well as all the efficiency benefits of TSMC’s special 4N process, Ada adds new graphics pipelines such as shader execution reordering, improved optical flow acceleration, and new RT core functions not present in Ampere. It is encouraging for Nvidia that the RTX 4090 Founders Edition shares the same design language as the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. As a result, Nvidia can offer superior thermal and noise performance that is the industry benchmark for AiB partner cards.
