The Nvidia RTX 4090 is almost upon us, but how will it fare against the current kingpins: the RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 3090? Let’s find out.
The Nvidia RTX 4090 is an upcoming flagship graphics card that looks set to dominate high-end gaming PCs and benchmark top-10 lists in the not-too-distant future. Without much news of AMD’s upcoming next-generation cards, though, the conversation falls to how well the RTX 4090 will fare against the existing kings of the hill: the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti.
Will these soon-to-be last-generation cards still hold their own, or is the RTX 4090 set to dominate in unprecedented fashion?
Nvidia released (almost) the full specifications for the RTX 4090 at its GTC keynote speech, debuting it alongside the RTX 4080 for the first time.
With the next generation of GPUs, we’ll see a big uptick in CUDA cores again, as well as additional RT and Tensor cores helping to deliver faster ray tracing and better DLSS. Clock speeds have taken a big leap too, which will help deliver the big performance gains Nvidia is claiming are possible, as will the next generation of Nvidia RT and tensor cores. We don’t yet have confirmed numbers on those new cores, but a graph was shown during Nvidia’s GTC showcase that suggested they could come in much greater numbers, too.
The added efficiency of the new architecture on its new 4nm process is what appears to have allowed Nvidia to raise core count and clock speeds so dramatically while maintaining the same power requirements as the RTX 3090 Ti. That’s still a big TDP, but it’s certainly more manageable than some of the rumored totals that were doing the rounds in recent weeks.
Memory configurations seem to remain much the same as the RTX 3090 Ti, though they still represent a big uplift over the RTX 3090.
