We take NVIDIA’s powerful new GeForce RTX 4090 for a spin in our in-depth review, and wow does this thing fly.
Under The Hood Of Ada Lovelace And The AD102 GPU
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A couple of weeks back, during the GTC 2022 keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the first salvo of GeForce RTX 40 series cards based on the company’s cutting-edge Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. Three cards were unveiled, all based on different slices of silicon, the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB (AD104), the RTX 4080 16GB (AD103), and the top-end GeForce RTX 4090 (AD102). The dynamic duo of GeForce RTX 4080s are due to arrive next month, but today – one day before cards are set to hit store shelves – we get to show you exactly what the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 can do, and wow is this thing a powerful beast.Based on the specifications and new features Jensen revealed, we came into this article knowing that GeForce RTX 4090 was going to be one heck of graphics card. But over and above whatever gaming performance gains come by way of the massive 76B transistor GPU and new architectural efficiencies, many of the key features exclusive to the Ada Lovelace architecture are meant to further boost performance in both gaming and content creation workloads, and enhance the overall gaming experience too.Here’s a quick hands-on tour of a couple of GeForce RTX 4090 cards, one from MSI and the other directly from NVIDIA. After that, we’ll get some particulars out of the way, check out NVIDIA’s Founder’s Edition card, and then we’ll dive in a little deeper and see how the RTX 4090 performs. If times are tight at the moment, we’re going to go ahead and warn you to hide your credit cards right now. When you see what this thing can do, even GeForce RTX 3090 Ti owners are going to be green with envy…Though NVIDIA has branded this card the GeForce RTX 4090, like its predecessor the RTX 3090, it fits into the same category previously held by NVIDIA’s Titan RTX and older Titan-branded cards. As such, the GeForce RTX 4090 isn’t solely a product targeted at gamers. Of course, powerful GPUs with thousands of cores, high clocks, gobs of memory, and the latest media engines are typically well-suited to content creation and gaming, so we did some testing across an array of workloads in an attempt to paint a complete picture of GeForce RTX 4090 performance. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.Before we go any further, we want to highlight a couple of previous articles:We have already covered much of the underlying technology at the heart of the GeForce RTX 4090, so we won’t be doing so again here. If you want the full scoop on Ada Lovelace and the new features it brings to the RTX 40 series, we recommend checking out our coverage of the architecture and of NVIDIA’s initial GeForce RTX 40 series other GTX 2022 announcements. Once you’ve got all of that meat digested, you’ll better understand what the GeForce RTX 4090 we’ll be showing you here today is all about.The new AD102-powered GeForce RTX 4090 is beefed-up and enhanced versus the previous-gen GA102-based GeForce RTX 3090 /3090 Ti in almost every way. The AD102 at the heart of the GeForce RTX 4090 is packing 11 GPCs, 42 TPCs, and 84 SMs, versus 7, 42, and 84 in the AD102, respectively. All told, the AD102 has more CUDA Cores (16,384 vs. 10,752), more RT Cores (512 vs. 336), and more Tensor Cores (128 vs. 84) versus GA102, and all of those cores are of a newer-generation as well.
