NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition

[HenrySomeone]

It is the beast of the moment and no one is forcing you to buy it. You want pure performance in 4K, you buy it... if you can afford it. You want to play decently in 8k, buy it. Play WoT in 1080p, don't buy it!
For Content Creation, this price is really low. It takes 2x3090Ti to beat it in this segment.

Precisely! Under proper, gpu-constrained circumstances (top cpu, 4k resolution, rt), it is anything but a "generic performance leap" and is simply leagues above everything else and will most likely retain a very healthy lead even against the best rdna3 will have to offer.

 

[Bwaze]

No, it simply isn't. It's similar leap that RTX 3080, GTX 1080 Ti made, no matter how you sugarcoat it.

 

[Gica]

How come 40%-somthing perf boost is not a disappointment after promised "2-4 times faster"?

3080Ti vs 2080Ti was a 56% bump, mind you.

How is 4080 supposed to compete, given it is a heavily cut down version of 4090?

"In full ray-traced games, the RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 is up to 4x faster compared to last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2"
In this screenshot, there are "only" 3x and surely 4K players are extremely unhappy playing at an average of 120 fps. It was better around 30-40 fps average.

 

[W1zzard]

In this screenshot

This testing is with DLSS 3 Frame Generation disabled, enabling it will double the FPS, so another +100%

 

[HTC]

This testing is with DLSS 3 Frame Generation disabled, enabling it will double the FPS, so another +100%

Possibly right, but the problem is that they claimed up to 2 in raster and up to 4 in DLSS 3, and they seemed to have failed in the 1st.

Have ANY of the games tested gotten 2 times faster in raster, like nVidia claimed?

Also, 2 times faster VS which card exactly?

 

[W1zzard]

Have ANY of the games tested gotten 2 times faster in raster, like nVidia claimed?

Not that I'm aware of

 

[karakarga]

4090 --> Expensive, but good performance.
4080 --> High price for really lower performance, only 256 bit memory bus for the second member, it must have or would be better called as 4070!

The good: 4nm production, good new DLSS features, AV1 encode & decode, doubles Ram amount for the memory bus.
The Bad: Still PCI-ex 4.0, same generation ram & speed, still no h266 encode & decode.

I was thinking to buy one, but with those specs, I give up and decided to wait for 5xxx series better.

 

[HenrySomeone]

4090 --> Expensive, but good performance.
4080 --> High price for really lower performance, only 256 bit memory bus for the second member, it must have or would be better called as 4070!

Very failed logic here; let me remind you that AMD's very top card(s) also have exactly 256 bit bus. If anything, you could complain about a lot less cuda cores...

The Bad: Still PCI-ex 4.0, same generation ram & speed, still no h266 encode & decode.

 

[karakarga]

Very failed logic here; let me remind you that AMD's very top card(s) also have exactly 256 bit bus. If anything, you could complain about a lot less cuda cores...

I am not counting AMD in any way. Noisy, worth nothing, but for Mac's. 256 bit bus is really low, 512 bit is essential today, I want to see 512 bit HBM. Core count not always represent more productivity AMD is not good at Ray-tracing. Nearly 15 years, I am not buying AMD graphics cards. I did not forget failing Sapphire cards, all of a sudden death. My last was a HD6850, that time nVidia was more or less DX 12 capable starting 4xx, but AMD not. You can still use 4xx and 5xx Geforce cards with Windows 11 but not with AMD from that time. Nearly every 3 week a new driver comes from nVidia, by AMD not even every 3 months. Never use AMD, let them used at Mac's as a hell....

 

[medi01]

"In full ray-traced games, the RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 is up to 4x faster compared to last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2"
In this screenshot, there are "only" 3x and surely 4K players are extremely unhappy playing at an average of 120 fps. It was better around 30-40 fps average.

In this screenshot it is 68/40 => around 1.7 times faster.

"But if I run it at lower resolution and upscale it?" => yes, if you run it at lower resolution it "gets faster" indeed...

 

[Gica]

All manufacturers (it doesn't matter if they produce processors or nails) will praise their products based on tests. If in one of these they have a "4x", then they will mark that product as "up to 4x".
I think you remember that with the first Radeon PCIe 4.0, AMD used this aspect with much fanfare. Was it fake? No, but they didn't say that this PCIe 4.0 doesn't bring even 0.000000001% performance increase for those video cards.
Advertising, the soul of commerce. Fortunately, we have reviews for hardware.

 

[HenrySomeone]

I am not counting AMD in any way. Noisy, worth nothing, but for Mac's. 256 bit bus is really low, 512 bit is essential today, I want to see 512 bit HBM. Core count not always represent more productivity AMD is not good at Ray-tracing. Nearly 15 years, I am not buying AMD graphics cards. I did not forget failing Sapphire cards, all of a sudden death. My last was a HD6850, that time nVidia was more or less DX 12 capable starting 4xx, but AMD not. You can still use 4xx and 5xx Geforce cards with Windows 11 but not with AMD from that time. Nearly every 3 week a new driver comes from nVidia, by AMD not even every 3 months. Never use AMD, let them used at Mac's as a hell....

Ahhh, okay. It's just that 99% of posts like this are from AMD fanboys who never fail to display disgusting double standards and I guess I just assumed something similar... Still though, more than 256 bit bus on a xx80 series card is far more of an exception rather than the rule, appearing only once in the last 8 years (namely 3080) and 512 bit only a single time ever (gtx 280 over 14 years ago).

All manufacturers (it doesn't matter if they produce processors or nails) will praise their products based on tests. If in one of these they have a "4x", then they will mark that product as "up to 4x".
I think you remember that with the first Radeon PCIe 4.0, AMD used this aspect with much fanfare. Was it fake? No, but they didn't say that this PCIe 4.0 doesn't bring even 0.000000001% performance increase for those video cards.
Advertising, the soul of commerce. Fortunately, we have reviews for hardware.

It's interesting how it's always the same group of people who get hung up on this marketing discrepancies, except never with the ones from "their" company...

 

[Gica]

It's just as interesting how some minimize one of the most successful video card launches. Probably only Pascal can dethrone such a performance boom from one generation to another (only in gaming), but these "others" send the discussion into the weeds. I'm wodering why?
The prices of raw materials and energy have increased enormously, salaries have also increased, but wait for the good times when an RTX x090 will be 400% more competitive than its predecessor and will cost $49.9.
Prices are closely related to demand. If the demand is high, the prices will be high.

RTX 4090:
1. The first video card that allows you a high (60+) fps with maximum details (including RT) in 4K
2. A decent fps in 8K
3. Explosion in Content Creation, by far the biggest jump in performance from one generation to another.

 

[Valantar]

I am not counting AMD in any way. Noisy, worth nothing, but for Mac's. 256 bit bus is really low, 512 bit is essential today, I want to see 512 bit HBM. Core count not always represent more productivity AMD is not good at Ray-tracing. Nearly 15 years, I am not buying AMD graphics cards. I did not forget failing Sapphire cards, all of a sudden death. My last was a HD6850, that time nVidia was more or less DX 12 capable starting 4xx, but AMD not. You can still use 4xx and 5xx Geforce cards with Windows 11 but not with AMD from that time. Nearly every 3 week a new driver comes from nVidia, by AMD not even every 3 months. Never use AMD, let them used at Mac's as a hell....

Wow, it's really clear that you haven't been near an AMD GPU in a decade if that's how you think things are. AMD has released at least a GPU driver per month for at least all of 2022 (that's all that's listed on their 'previous drivers' site (current drivers are here)), and from my recollection for far longer than that. Whether it's important to you that a 2010 GPU still works in W11 is for you to decide, but I don't see that as a big issue - if your GPU is that old, most likely the rest of your hardware isn't W11 compatible anyway. It also obviously stands to reason that a much larger company like Nvidia will have more resources for long term support. Also, there's no W11 driver download on Nvidia's site for anything older than the 600 series, FWIW.

Oh, and what you're saying about memory buses is nonsense - you can't just do a 1:1 comparison between bus width today and ten years ago and pretend that it's the same - the VRAM itself is far faster, you have memory compression leading to significant speedups on top of that, and of course memory is utilized very differently in games today v. 10 years ago (asset streaming v. preloading etc.). It's still true that overall effective memory bandwidth has gone way down relative to the compute power of GPUs (mostly because compute has gone up massively, while memory hasn't become all that much faster), but that's unavoidable if you want to keep GPUs in usable form factors and at even somewhat affordable prices. Oh, and 512-bit HBM would suck. The whole point of HBM is its massive bus width - the Fury X had a 4096-bit bus. HBM clocks much lower than GDDR, but makes up for that with more bus width. What you want is at least 2048-bit HBM (current HBM is 4-8 times faster than the HBM1 on the Fury X), but ideally even more.

It's just as interesting how some minimize one of the most successful video card launches. Probably only Pascal can dethrone such a performance boom from one generation to another (only in gaming), but these "others" send the discussion into the weeds. I'm wodering why?
The prices of raw materials and energy have increased enormously, salaries have also increased, but wait for the good times when an RTX x090 will be 400% more competitive than its predecessor and will cost $49.9.
Prices are closely related to demand. If the demand is high, the prices will be high.

RTX 4090:
1. The first video card that allows you a high (60+) fps with maximum details (including RT) in 4K
2. A decent fps in 8K
3. Explosion in Content Creation, by far the biggest jump in performance from one generation to another.

The 4090 is definitely a very fast GPU, but there have been plenty of calculations done showing that its generational gains aren't that special - it's just that the past couple of generations have had particularly small gains, while this is more back to the previous norm. On the other hand it only manages this based on a 1.5-2x node jump.

Also, BOM costs are indeed higher than previously, so some cost increases do make sense, but you need to remember that this is a GPU with an MSRP 2-3x higher than its predecessors (except for the 30 series, which brought prices to this level to begin with). Also, salaries have increased? Really? Where? For who? In most of the Western world, middle class wages have been stagnant for decades.

 

[Gica]

The 4090 is definitely a very fast GPU, but there have been plenty of calculations done showing that its generational gains aren't that special - it's just that the past couple of generations have had particularly small gains, while this is more back to the previous norm. On the other hand it only manages this based on a 1.5-2x node jump.

Also, BOM costs are indeed higher than previously, so some cost increases do make sense, but you need to remember that this is a GPU with an MSRP 2-3x higher than its predecessors (except for the 30 series, which brought prices to this level to begin with). Also, salaries have increased? Really? Where? For who? In most of the Western world, middle class wages have been stagnant for decades.

At a performance increase of over 100% in Content Creation, where time means money, a creative studio amortizes its purchase price in less than a month. For gaming, even a GT 1030 is nothing more than an expense for entertainment.
P.S. The video cards are not manufactured in the West, and the carriers are not from the middle class of the West.
PPS. Someone buy them if you can't find them available here, even with prayers.

 

[Valantar]

At a performance increase of over 100% in Content Creation, where time means money, a creative studio amortizes its purchase price in less than a month.

... And? Does that somehow make its generational performance increase any bigger than it is?

For gaming, even a GT 1030 is nothing more than an expense for entertainment.

Again: and? Is entertainment not something worth paying for?

P.S. The video cards are not manufactured in the West

... did anyone say so?

and the carriers are not from the middle class of the West.

"Carriers"?

Most high end/expensive GPUs are sold in the West, and as they're priced well out of reach of anyone not at least middle class, that and above is the target market. Asia is definitely growing into a juggernaut of a PC market, but is still dominated by lower end hardware due to overall lower income levels.

 

[CarlkCarson]

DLSS3 Frame Generation not work in windows11 insider build 25227, crash games, do you know of any way to fix it?

 

[wheresmycar]

It's just as interesting how some minimize one of the most successful video card launches. Probably only Pascal can dethrone such a performance boom from one generation to another (only in gaming), but these "others" send the discussion into the weeds. I'm wodering why?
The prices of raw materials and energy have increased enormously, salaries have also increased, but wait for the good times when an RTX x090 will be 400% more competitive than its predecessor and will cost $49.9.
Prices are closely related to demand. If the demand is high, the prices will be high.

Interesting? Should have been the other way around for the 99%-99.9% of gamers. How about:

• "its rather interesting how a tiny handful of gamers are buying $1600-$2000 4090s... no seriously its interesting!! But thats about all, just interesting!
  
  
• "its rather interesting we the 99ers have to put up with the ~1% percenters raising miniscule DEMAND which runs price-inflated shockwaves through the wider all-tier SUPPLY war machine... poor ole disinterested and disparaging 99er anomalies - empty your bank accounts pls!!"
  
  
• "its rather interesting the most successful video card launch surrounding the flagship is unambiguously targeted at the ~1%.... can't believe the rest of them never came out in flip flops singing songs of nV triumphant hymns"
  
  
• "its rather interesting 2X-4X raster performance didnt even make it to the flagship, God knows what 4000 series has in store for the non-flagship models.... maybe a 0.3x increase for the bottom barrel scrapers and a price justifiable free lollypop - that ought to shup em up!"
  
  
• "its rather interesting the XX80 club is now banishing whopping $800 spends... silly minions no entry for you guys unless you top up with $400 more or above the already inflated $700-$800 recent spikes (which never settled) for the VIP green card.... Oh, and supposedly the increase in wages should help by ~2025"
  
  
• "its rather interesting with a little noise our holy omniscent NVIDIA pulled the 4080-12.... actually interestingly laughable for the $900 asking price if you ask me..... whats more interesting is NVIDIAs gigantic balls for the attempt in the first place"
  
  
• "its rather interesting I was interested but now disinterested... so much for the 'most successful video card launches' for the ~1% vacuum which is hardly a success measuring tool for the all-encompassing wider gaming consumer who almost fits the entire pie. That leaves us room for celebration for nV and the VIP ~1% or ~0.1%... and not forgetting NVs extremely successful profiteering punt which seemingly fortifies exortionate pricing standardisation across the board....definitely deserves a BIG SALUTE to those heavy jaw busting pocket rinsing weighty nV BALLS - only i'm gutted, i don't get a dividend to share the same level of self-indulgent satisfaction"

No qualms with the content creator segment...

....but wait for the good times when an RTX x090 will be 400% more competitive than its predecessor and will cost $49.9.

$49.90 :O

$0.10 less from 50 bucks... thats a steal!!! Although i suspect, by then i'll be bald, old and sold 6-feet under six-fold

LASTLY, to add perspective... nVs set the $-bar very high and no doubt RDNA3 will follow (to some extent anyway) = hardly exciting times for the gaming consumer! lol everyones banging on about platform costs, mobo premiums and DDR5 mark-ups... rightly so! but little stones compared to nVs big rock of BALLS

 

[Gica]

Something is not right with you. We complain about prices, but we missed the session where the fundamental principle of the market economy was taught: "demand sets the price".
If AMD* launches a product, not similar but even more powerful in all aspects, do you think they will sell it cheap???? Hint: look at the price of their processors

*AMD, because it is the only real competitor for nVidia, but you can also look at the energy market.

 

[Valantar]

"demand sets the price".

Literally nobody in the world with any basic understanding of how economics works would agree with your utterly simplistic application of this idea here. The 4090 isn't $1600 because of demand, it's $1600 because Nvidia feels comfortable pricing it at that level. They didn't just offer up the GPU to "the market" at whatever price and then $1600 spontaneously appeared out of the ether - they picked a price they saw as giving them the highest possible profits while still selling - and they've been working hard for years and years to normalize the idea of ever more expensive GPUs.

 

[Gica]

Putin's army is not coming to force you to buy video cards based on some ... referendum. The money is yours and you decide what to buy. The price is adjusted according to the demand and it seems that it exists because in the stores they are even more expensive.
Let's leave the past. Gone are the days when a video card had 2-3 million transistors, 3 mosfets and 5 grams of aluminum.

Excursions in the cosmos.
Sports cars.
Holiday in Dubai.
5-star hotels and restaurants.
The latest iphone
Million dollar jewelry
and so on
They all fit into the enthusiast in their category. The price you pay is definitely not a fair one, but that's how the market works. You want a "Ferrari" video card, pay or sit on the sidelines and complain that the grapes are sour.

 

[Valantar]

Putin's army is not coming to force you to buy video cards based on some ... referendum. The money is yours and you decide what to buy. The price is adjusted according to the demand and it seems that it exists because in the stores they are even more expensive.
Let's leave the past. Gone are the days when a video card had 2-3 million transistors, 3 mosfets and 5 grams of aluminum.

Excursions in the cosmos.
Sports cars.
Holiday in Dubai.
5-star hotels and restaurants.
The latest iphone
Million dollar jewelry
and so on
They all fit into the enthusiast in their category. The price you pay is definitely not a fair one, but that's how the market works. You want a "Ferrari" video card, pay or sit on the sidelines and complain that the grapes are sour.

Seriously, you really, really, really need to brush up on some very, very basic principles of economics. Luxury products like that are a prime example of the fact that sypply v. demand as a price-regulating mechanism is a gross oversimplification that only has any applicability on a very large scale, abstracted from any specific product. You also seem entirely blind to the fact that demand isn't just something that spontaneously appears in the world, but is itself fundamentally bound up in marketing, advertising, culture, money, and a lot more. Your "arguments" here are laughably simplistic.

 

[Gica]

Correct. They are simplistic, but real. If there is no demand for their offer, prices will drop. If demand exceeds supply, prices will rise. Damn, simplistic and true, right? According to this simplistic indicator, the market worked at the launch of the RTX 3000 and Radeon 6000 series. An explosion of demand triggered all the madness, and everything calmed down when the demand decreased.
Intel, without a competitor, sold octa cores for $2000 in 2017. In 2018, the same class of processors was sold for $800 when AMD came back into the game. If AMD succeeds in dethroning nVidia in terms of performance on all levels (rasterization, RT, Content Creation), do you think their cards will have a more customer-friendly msrp? You are stupid if you believe that and again they send you to their processors.

 

[wheresmycar]

Something is not right with you.

i tell that to myself every morning... a quick shower, a light breakie and a nice HOT cuppa tea gets me sorted double time

We complain about prices, but we missed the session where the fundamental principle of the market economy was taught: "demand sets the price".

Thats incorrect. Please don't try to validate this claim as you have done in some of the other posts but spend a little time looking into basic economic concepts encircling demand/supply and you'll have your answer. On your screen or hardback economicspedia often "price" will be used as a relevant piece of the puzzle but this should not be confused with "demand" being a "price-setter".

If AMD* launches a product, not similar but even more powerful in all aspects, do you think they will sell it cheap???? Hint: look at the price of their processors

*AMD, because it is the only real competitor for nVidia, but you can also look at the energy market.

Not entirely sure how the AMD correlation fell into our laps but if it helps - I absolutely don't believe AMD will sell surpassed performance for less, not in a million years. Even worse should AMD fall short of nVs performance feat I still suspect RDNA3's top end models to cost a BOMB... a highly undesirable outcome!! It's no secret, nV setting the stage and AMD tagging along hardly helps "us" the dissatisfied potential buyer. TBH, it surprises me having to witness people (consumers) bending over backwards in defence of these awful price hikes... for me thats 10-fold more startling than witnessing someone picking up a 4090 for gaming. The buyer fed his impulse/desire BUT the partisan vocalist fed his ........... [still tryna work that one out]

 

[Valantar]

Correct. They are simplistic, but real. If there is no demand for their offer, prices will drop. If demand exceeds supply, prices will rise. Damn, simplistic and true, right? According to this simplistic indicator, the market worked at the launch of the RTX 3000 and Radeon 6000 series.

... but this simplistic approach entirely fails to account for how and why this situation in fact indicated the exact opposite of a well functioning market.

An explosion of demand triggered all the madness, and everything calmed down when the demand decreased.

... and? The entire point here is that "supply and demand determines prices" is a gross oversimplification. Demand can be faked, or driven up in all kinds of manipulative or outright fraudulent ways. Supply can be artificially restrained - like Nvidia is currently doing with RTX 3000 GPUs. Even the balance between supply and demand can be tweaked and manipulated in all kinds of ways. Not to forget the fact that none of this is a given. It's all predicated on the premise that everyone in the value chain is out only for profiteering, and will drive up prices at any given opportunity. This is often the case - and it is indeed a mode of operations that capitalist ideologies promote very strongly - but it's not a universal law.

Intel, without a competitor, sold octa cores for $2000 in 2017. In 2018, the same class of processors was sold for $800 when AMD came back into the game. If AMD succeeds in dethroning nVidia in terms of performance on all levels (rasterization, RT, Content Creation), do you think their cards will have a more customer-friendly msrp? You are stupid if you believe that and again they send you to their processors.

... did I say any of that? It'd be nice if you actually made arguments of your own instead of drawing up ludicrous straw men. Nvidia has been working hard over the past few years to drive up premium GPU prices and to normalize the idea of >$1000 GPUs as a thing that has any reasonable existence in the market. There isn't a natural, pre-existing demand for these things - demands are manufactured, just as products are. That's what marketing is for, and what long term business and marketing strategies do. This is why luxury products operate entirely outside of the realm of supply and demand - because it's all manipulation, all the way. The premise of the logic of supply and demand regulating prices is that this happens in a value-neutral, non-manipulative market situation, not in one where market actors are working as hard as they can to push things in one direction or the other. And it's a model logic that entirely ignores these external manipulations, which is where it becomes woefully simplistic in relation to the actual real world, which is far, far, far too complex for any such logic to have anything but very broad applicability.