NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition

[BigMack70]

a 45% improvement over an already insane card is unremarkable?

Go to bed BigMack, you're drunk.

Yes it's unremarkable. It's ordinary. Expected. Routine.

Don't believe me? Go look at the flagship card launches for every generation of GPUs. Historically, it's ordinary and unremarkable in every way. It's identical to Ampere, slightly higher than Turing, MUCH lower than Pascal. Higher or lower than Maxwell depending on if you consider the 780 or the 780 Ti the Kepler flagship. Lower than Kepler.

Anyone jumping up and down as if a 45% performance improvement is anything other than expected is drinking Jensen's Kool-Aid and needs to take a break from Nvidia's marketing materials.

 

[birdie]

The biggest issue of this generation is that other cards despite costing an arm and a leg are castrated too much, not to mention that NVIDIA had no qualms calling RTX 4070 an RTX 4080.

It even looks like there will be no RTX 4060/4050 this gen and Nvidia will continue selling the previous generation stock.

 

[Colddecked]

Yes it's unremarkable. It's ordinary. Expected. Routine.

Don't believe me? Go look at the flagship card launches for every generation of GPUs. Historically, it's ordinary and unremarkable in every way. It's identical to Ampere, slightly higher than Turing, MUCH lower than Pascal. Higher or lower than Maxwell depending on if you consider the 780 or the 780 Ti the Kepler flagship. Lower than Kepler.

Anyone jumping up and down as if a 45% performance improvement is anything other than expected is drinking Jensen's Kool-Aid and needs to take a break from Nvidia's marketing materials.

I mean, you can see what it can do in games that can somewhat take advantage of its strong suits. 100% over a 3080 is nuts.

 

[Rokugan]

+63% vs RTX3090 @ 3x 2nd hand market price in Europe (2K vs 700 Eur)
+88% vs RTX3080 @ 4x 2nd hand market price in Europe (2K vs 500 Eur)

Absolutely idiotic pricing in Europe. No thanks Ngreedia

 

[LFaWolf]

Wow impressive performance and jump from last gen indeed. Great review!

 

[erek]

4k gaming beast.
Not that power hungry and not really hot.
if it fits your case and budget its a great card.

Thx for the amazing Review @W1zzard

Agree, immediately noticed the 4K performance, wonder if I can finally do 4K144 in GTA Online

 

[Denver]

I believe the CPU is limiting the performance the card can achieve, especially at 1080P.

It's worth a new round with the big dogs like 7700x/12900k and 5800x3d

 

[BigMack70]

I mean, you can see what it can do in games that can somewhat take advantage of its strong suits. 100% over a 3080 is nuts.

It's obviously a card that performs incredibly well.

My point is that the hyperbole in the conclusion of this review reflects severe historical ignorance and is unwarranted. It performs incredibly well, and its incredible performance uplift is exactly in the ordinary window of expectations that has been occurring for over a decade as new generations of GPU get launched.

This is a "meets expectations" product concerning traditional performance. Which is perfectly fine - generational improvements are fantastic and game-changing! But to act like this is an "exceeds expectations" product when talking about plain rasterized performance is nonsense. The Ray Tracing and feature set is in many ways extra-ordinary and I think some hyperbole there appears justified. But not on the baseline performance as exists currently in this review's conclusion.

 

[W1zzard]

May I notice that using Unigine Heaven at 1920x1080 for overclocked performance is not valid. Heaven is cpu limited in some parts of the test on much weaker cards, let alone 4090. Could you at least switch the res to 4k to minimize CPU bottleneck ? I bet the performance gained from overclocking should be closer to 10% in that case.

I'm only using a small subset of Heaven, the most demanding area. I've seen it do over 500 FPS in that scene, so not completely CPU limited.
I'll still look into a better test though, but that invalidates all previous data, so lots of retesting will be needed

It's worth a new round with the big dogs like 7700x/12900k and 5800x3d

Will upgrade CPU later this year. I just spent two weeks in summer retesting on the current 5800X. Due to so many cards, games and resolutions I can't just switch easily

 

[HD64G]

Me thinks that using 5800X instead of 5800X3D or 7700X is bottlenecking 4090 up to 1440P. That also keeps power consumption lower and increased the efficiency. My 5c.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

How is better all they did was add more ROP? there a 57% increase in ROP's vs a 3090 and add mhz to the core the lower node makes this card effeinct it's actally Crappy vs ampere.

a 45% improvement over an already insane card is unremarkable?

Go to bed BigMack, you're drunk.

10% increase clock speeds
57% increase in ROP's
48% increase in TMU's
52% increase in Shaders
52% increase in Tensor cores
52% increase in RT cores.
12 times the L2cache

4nm vs 8nm ?

The power drop seems like it's all from the node.

 

[Vipeax]

Average fps being around 150 fps at 4k indicates a CPU limited as others have also concluded. This also makes any talks about percentages irrelevant for now.

 

[mashie]

Nice card, won't fit my case.

 

[Crackong]

Be ready for the disaster, 4080 12GB has 2x less cores => 3080 10GB perforamnce level

This

4080(16GB) has exactly 60% of cuda of 4090
4080(12GB) is just 47%

 

[bobsled]

Awesome review! Thanks for the testing without DLSS!

Interesting how Nvidia doesn’t seem to be increasing RT capability ahead of raster, but rather keeping it in line. (RT performance impact in FPS vs not enabled)

 

[ymdhis]

Ah yes, the new flagship card is out, I can't wait until TPU's entire first page will be filled with 30 iterations of "company X releasing card Y" headlines.

also, 500W, lmao.

Yes it's unremarkable. It's ordinary. Expected. Routine.

Don't believe me? Go look at the flagship card launches for every generation of GPUs. Historically, it's ordinary and unremarkable in every way. It's identical to Ampere, slightly higher than Turing, MUCH lower than Pascal. Higher or lower than Maxwell depending on if you consider the 780 or the 780 Ti the Kepler flagship. Lower than Kepler.

Anyone jumping up and down as if a 45% performance improvement is anything other than expected is drinking Jensen's Kool-Aid and needs to take a break from Nvidia's marketing materials.

This guy has a point, new cards being almost twice as fast has been always a thing. You can practically go back to the 3dfx Voodoo 2 and still see the same numbers.

 

[bobsled]

Yep, less total W consumption in gaming (vs. 3090ti, 3090, 3080ti) while much much faster.

Samsung 8nm really can’t win against TSMC’s processes. The reduction in transistor size (ie density) alone would’ve done major favours.

 

[nguyen]

5800X + 16GB (single rank) memory are just too slow for next gen of GPUs

 

[gridracedriver]

Impressed by the performance watt, better than I expected, the dlss3 however does not convince me, excellent performance but low quality for now.

The real problem remains the price, no perf / cost increase and the size, too big.

 

[Gica]

View attachment 264998

+63% vs RTX3090 @ 3x 2nd hand market price in Europe (2K vs 700 Eur)
+88% vs RTX3080 @ 4x 2nd hand market price in Europe (2K vs 500 Eur)

Absolutely idiotic pricing in Europe. No thanks Ngreedia

+13223363% vs Mazda
+354534242% vs Logan

Absolutely idiotic pricing in Europe. No thanks Ferrari.

PS.
All women in the world are anatomically identical. However, you don't choose randomly, no. If you want one of the elite, you have to make efforts.
As for the price, the RTX 4090 sells for a price at which you'd consider yourself lucky if you got a 3080 last year.

 

[mechtech]

Take Aways

TSMC 4nm looks good
Power use can be crazy
Vsync power use surprisingly low
Most 1080p/1440p no point for this card
No DP 2.0
Good RT performance (if you have any games with that)
MSRP not even close to retail - seeing $3400-$4000 here in Canada W/o the 13% tax

Nice beast but hard pass. Will get all new appliances first.

 

[wolf]

That efficiency at 450w dayum, 2x perf watt over Ampere just about, I'd wager it will be further down the stack.

Still, too big, too expensive and not quite enough for me to consider replacing a 3080 with one right this very minute.

 

[Ayhamb99]

While the power consumption at stock speeds wasn't as bad as i thought it would be, for anyone who is thinking of buying this thing and overclocking it, prepare yourself

 

[CyberCT]

While impressive, I'm disappointed. There were multiple "leaks" on Videocardz.com showing nearly double the performance of a 3090. This was looking like a 980 => 1080 generational jump. The 4090 isn't anywhere near that. Yes, 64ish % is a nice uplift, but I was hoping those "leaks" were true. The only reason I was looking to upgrade was for better VR performance, and right now, not even the 4090 at it's current performance will be powerful enough for the upcoming high end VR headsets. Heck it won't be completely capable for the currently available Pimax 8KX DMAS in all games. Maybe the simple games will be OK.

With rain effects and multiple cars in Assetto Corsa, I have to drop my Reverb G2 down to 50% resolution scale to get a constant 90fps on my 3080ti. Was hoping the 4090 would allow it to run at the full 100%, which should be possible if it truly was @ double the performance as the leaks showed.

They really need to release VR headsets with VRR or Gsync.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Nice but this does not compel me to want to buy one.