GeForce RTX 4090 Review.NVIDIA once again set a performance record that will be unattainable for most home PCs for a long time
It’s done: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is on sale. Alas, in Russia this year the company canceled PR activities, and Russian reviews for the card will be delayed (including on our website). Therefore, we looked and read Western reviews and collected a selection of interesting and useful information about the potentially fastest video card for the next couple of years.
GeForce RTX 4090 Review
Average performance
Comparing FPS from different computers and different settings is not the best idea, because additional factors can come into play, so we compared the performance gain between the most powerful graphics card of the past generation GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and the new king RTX 4090. We took data from benchmarks of 8 major sites and YouTube channels and calculated the average performance gain.
As you can see, the RTX 4090 is 56% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti on average. Not a twofold increase, but NVIDIA compared it with the regular 3090, which is 10-20% weaker than the Ti version.
Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips (LTT) has released one of the most balanced reviews of the RTX 4090 FE, covering the history of the 90-series graphics cards, performance in games and work applications, and the problems buyers of these cards will face.
As usual, LTT immediately reminds that x090 video cards are an extreme luxury. According to NVIDIA itself, they came to replace the Titan series, while they do not have a special improved functionality for floating point calculations and other Titan chips, but they ask for the same amount of money.
However, when comparing the RTX 4090 to the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti, the performance gain between generations is impressive. The new graphics card has 50% more CUDA cores (FP32 units that do graphics computing) and each runs at a frequency 30% higher. The video card was tested on a computer with a new AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor against NVIDIA recommendations (the drivers for the reviews are still raw and not optimized for the newly released processors), so LTT experienced crashes in games and a complete inability to test DLSS 3.0.
But even without this, the results are impressive. In Cyberpunk 2077 , the game showed an incredible performance increase of around 220%, but after the release of the video, it turned out that the image quality presets sometimes break in the game and FSR 2.0 accidentally turned on, although the switch visually remained off. After repeated testing, the lead over the 3090 Ti was slightly less convincing – 169% without RT and without DLSS, 59% with RT Psycho and without DLSS, and 62% with RT Psycho and DLSS.
Forza Horizon 5 showed a typical result – an increase in the region of 60% and a very large increase in minimum frame rates, which makes the gameplay smoother, without jerks. This applies to almost all games.
For 3D rendering, editing, and other work that makes heavy use of the graphics card, the RTX 4090 proved to be an even more significant upgrade. Twice as fast in Blender, noticeably faster in DaVinci Resolve (difficult to measure, need larger projects for more linear scaling), Maya, Solidworks, etc.
Host Anthony Yang paid special attention to the hardware encoder of the AV1 video codec. This is a common feature of new video cards from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, but the RTX 4090 has two such encoders, and in previous generations each encoder could encode two video streams at the same time. Whether the 4090 can handle 4 streams in AV1 is unknown, but full support for the new high-quality video format that YouTube and Netflix already support and that Twitch is experimenting with is very good, as is its support by all three graphics card manufacturers.
Almost no one talks about the disadvantages of the 40-series GeForce RTX: there is no support for PCIe Gen 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.0. NVIDIA claims that there is no need for DisplayPort 2.0 and the unannounced 2.1 specification, because no one will play more than 8K60. LTT counters this argument by saying that the newer versions of the connectors support 4K at over 120Hz refresh rates, which can become very relevant given the insane frame rates that the RTX 4090 can render but not display.
Another downside: PCIe Gen 5.0. In theory, this is not a problem, but it is worth remembering that now not only video cards use PCIe lanes, but also USB, SSD, etc. It makes sense that a system with an RTX 4090 could have a lot of fast devices competing for PCIe lanes, and it would be nice if the 4090 could use x8 Gen 5 instead of x16 Gen 4, freeing up bandwidth for other devices. A very strange decision for a premium device with a premium price tag.
der8auer
The legendary German overclocker Der8auer approached the review from an engineering point of view, measuring efficiency, power consumption and testing with an Intel i9-12900KS processor overclocked to a stable 5.1 GHz.
Like other reviewers, Der8auer came to the conclusion that testing the RTX 4090 at resolutions below 4K does not make sense, because almost all games are limited either by processor speed or by the limitation of the game engine.
Der8auer’s testing showed that the RTX 4090 is 40-80% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti at the same power consumption – this is an interesting claim, because on paper they have the same TDP, but in reality the RTX 4090 does not go above 422 watts. According to PCIe, the card consumes almost exactly 10 watts. Der8auer tested the card at various power consumptions and found that its efficiency peaked at 40%, and after 60% the performance gain was close to the results from overclocking. According to Der8auer, NVIDIA could have made a much smaller graphics card with almost no loss in power.
With the power consumption limited to 60%, the card began to draw “only” 283 W, but the performance in PUBG fell only by 5%, and in Cyberpunk 2077 – by 2%. After that, the card became almost silent.
Der8auer also did some pre-testing on DLSS 3.0. According to him, the new algorithm creates a clearer and sharper image than conventional TAA. Quality mode doubles performance, Performance – increases it by 2.5 times. Avor couldn’t find a significant difference between the image quality of the Quality and Performance modes, but did note a strange jitter in the highlights in the water and not the most convincing objects in the distance. Der8auer tested in a pre-release copy of A Plague Tale: Requiem, so it is possible that these are problems with an early build of the game or the implementation of the algorithm in the game.
Overall, Der8auer noted that this is the biggest jump in performance between generations of graphics cards on his memory.
Gamers Nexus
Steve from Gamers Nexus pointed out some interesting features that other reviewers didn’t see.
First, he noted that the kit comes with an adapter from four conventional 8-pin PCIe power connectors to a new 12-pin PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR 600W connector. However, only three PCIe power cables are needed for the graphics card to work, the fourth is only needed for overclocking with increasing power limit above 100%. The new connector comes with a “smart controller” that tells the graphics card how much power it can get over the wire.
Interestingly, Corsair released a rather harsh rebuttal to this information, but Gamers Nexus, in their RTX 4090 FE deep analysis video, posted an excerpt from an as yet unreleased interview with an NVIDIA engineer who plainly says that everything is correct, three PCIe wires should be enough for the correct work RTX 4090 FE.
Secondly, Gamers Nexus praised the updated design of the Founders Edition card from NVIDIA itself. Usually cards from partners like MSI, ASUS, Palit, etc. significantly superior to the basic design, but not this time. Very low noise and very good cooling, which was tested not only with built-in sensors, but also with separate electronic sensors that Gamers Nexus inserted into all the important components of the video card, and the heatsink of one of them was sawn apart to see how it was made.
In terms of performance, everything corresponds to the measurements of colleagues: it is useless to test at 1080p and 1440p, at 4K it is about 70% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti in regular games and up to 80% faster in ray-traced games. DLSS 3.0 has not yet been tested, because there are too few real games with its support.
The GeForce RTX 4090 came out as a rather strange card. It is expensive, but in order to unleash at least part of its potential, you need an equally expensive processor, motherboard and memory. And even the latest hardware is still often the limiting factor, except for games like Cyberpunk 2077. This makes it an ideal graphics card for testing processors, but Intel and AMD will still have to push their CPUs to the level of NVIDIA progress. For the near future, the GeForce RTX 4090 will remain the most powerful NVIDIA graphics card, because it already uses the fastest version of GDDR6X memory, and when the faster one will be released is unknown. Intel will likely need another couple of generations to catch up to NVIDIA, while AMD could come out with a real strong response with the Radeon RX 7000 series, but rumors say that’s unlikely. So get used to:
