Introduction

We have with us the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra graphics card, the company's premium air-cooled custom-design RTX 3090 offering. The RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra features EVGA's iCX3 cooling solution that approaches the task of cooling this 350 W GPU with not just a meaty heatsink ventilated by fans, but such innovations as cutouts in the PCB that let the airflow through, and a network of thermal sensors at critical areas to help the cooler respond better to heat. The GeForce RTX 3090 transcends the barrier between client gaming graphics and professional visualization, letting content creators leverage its awesome 24 GB video memory and nearly 1 TB/s memory bandwidth to deal with vast graphics rendering datasets, especially when paired with NVIDIA's GeForce Studio drivers. No doubt, it's better endowed than the RTX 3080, but NVIDIA believes that its gaming capabilities can't be seen in isolation to justify double the price of the RTX 3080. Hence, the company considers the RTX 3080 to be its "flagship" gaming product.

With the GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere," NVIDIA has reshaped the top end of its product stack. The RTX 3090, although the meatiest GPU on paper and priced the highest, isn't considered to be the company's flagship graphics product. The RTX 3080 is capable of AAA gaming at 4K Ultra HD with RTX raytracing on, which means the RTX 3090 attains a "halo" status not unlike that of the TITAN series. While the previous-generation TITAN RTX was priced at $2,500, the RTX 3090 starts $1,000 cheaper, at $1,500. It's up to you what you want to do with an almost fully unlocked "GA102" GPU and 24 GB of blistering fast memory.



The GeForce "Ampere" architecture represents the second generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX technology, which brings real-time raytracing to the consumer graphics segment. While we're still a bit far off from fully raytraced graphics, NVIDIA figured out a way to combine conventional raster 3D graphics with real-time raytraced components, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient-occlusion, and global-illumination. With the 2nd generation RTX, NVIDIA is introducing raytraced motion blur, an effect that's extremely difficult to pull off in real-time and was until now emulated in post-processing.

The 2nd generation RTX is a combination of new "Ampere" CUDA cores that offer up to double the math throughput over the previous-generation using concurrent INT32 and FP32 operations; second generation RT cores that double the intersection throughput and feature fixed function hardware with temporal components to accelerate ray-traced motion blur; and third generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to accelerate AI inference performance by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA combines these with a blistering new memory technology it calls GDDR6X and co-developed with Micron Technology—it takes advantage of the new PAM4 signaling format to increase the data rate. The RTX 3090 features a 384-bit wide memory bus with 19.5 Gbps memory throughput, which works out to a stellar 940 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU leverages the PCI-Express Gen 4 bus.

EVGA bolstered the GeForce RTX 3090 for the enthusiast gaming and overclocking market with the RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra, which is priced at about $1,800, a $300 premium. The iCX3 triple-slot cooler leverages a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a high fin-surface area and three hydro-dynamic bearing fans, where the middle fan is pushed slightly out of alignment of the other fans. EVGA also innovated cutouts in the PCB at various places, so air from the cooler can flow right through, similar to the dual-axial flow-through cooling solution of the Founders Edition card. The FTW3 Ultra also pulls power through three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, giving the RTX 3090 sufficient power to sustain its GPU Boost frequencies better. EVGA gave the FTW3 Ultra a hearty overclock of 1800 MHz (compared to the 1695 MHz reference). In this review, we put the card through its paces against several other RTX 3090 cards we tested, as well as its nearest rival—the RTX 3080.