Introduction

Palit GeForce RTX 4090 GameRock OC looks like a piece of jewellery when installed and illuminated. This is one RTX 4090 you'll want for cases with vertical slots and a glass window. The RTX 4090 "Ada" leads NVIDIA's latest GeForce "Ada Lovelace" RTX 40-series generation of graphics cards, as the company prepares to turn the page to the next generation. It introduces the third generation of NVIDIA RTX, a groundbreaking innovation to PC graphics that blends conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real time ray-traced elements to enhance realism by an order of magnitude. Making this possible is the new 3rd generation RT core that is able to accelerate more of the ray tracing pipeline by fixed-function hardware with the introduction of two new components; and the 4th gen Tensor core, which leverages FP8 to significantly increase AI neural net building and training. There's also the new Optical Flow Accelerator, which helps generate entire frames of games or videos using AI, without involving the raster graphics engine.



NVIDIA's mandate for the GeForce RTX 4090 is clear—to offer a performance leadership over the previous generation of the kind we're used to seeing from the company, when Moore's Law still worked for GPUs. The 5 nm "AD102" silicon that powers the RTX 4090, triples transistor-count over the previous-generation, while maintaining a slightly smaller die-size; and a similar typical board power value of 450 W (identical to that of the RTX 3090 Ti). The idea here is to generationally increase performance in excess of 50 percent.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is carved out of the AD102 silicon by enabling 128 out of 144 streaming multiprocessors physically present, giving you 16,384 CUDA cores (out of 18,432 present); 128 RT cores, 512 Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The memory sub-system is physically unchanged from the RTX 3090 Ti—it's still 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit interface, but NVIDIA has significantly increased the on-die caches on the GPU. The L2 cache is increased from 6 MB on "Ampere" to 72 MB on the RTX 4090. While the GPU uses PCIe Gen 4 host interface, its power architecture meets PCIe Gen 5 standards, and NVIDIA has standardized 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connectors for power across the RTX 4090 series, including custom cards.

The Palit RTX 4090 GameRock OC attempts to score both as the company's fastest custom-design graphics card based on this silicon; as well as its most aesthetically-rich model. The card is covered in RGB LED illumination zones, the most striking of which is on the front side. Acrylic crystal structures are made to give you the appearance of peeking through a kaleidoscope, and since the background is dark, Palit refers to its overall design scheme as "Midnight Kaleidoscope." Besides these aesthetic touches you get Palit's highest factory-overclock for the RTX 4090, with a GPU Boost frequency of 2.61 GHz, compared to 2.52 GHz reference. The memory is untouched at 21 Gbps, and so is the power limit out of the box, at 450 W. Enthusiast-friendly features include an on-card RGB controller to sync your case lighting to the card; and dual-BIOS.

Palit hasn't shared any pricing with us yet, we're expecting that the GameRock OC will sell for $1700, and use this price point accordingly throughout the review.