We've made it!
The Nvidia RTX 4090 has been unveiled and we are finally free of rumors, and can now have a look at the Green Team's new beastly lineup.
The RTX 30-series has served us all well and continues to be a game-changing line of graphics cards, with its beastly performance and versatility for both gaming and professional creative work.
There has been a slew of whispers and a lot of hype on social media for the big unveiling at the GeForce Beyond event. So we’d like to look at our past while racing towards the future, and compare the RTX 3090 with what we know about the RTX 4090 so far.
Pricing and Availability
The price of RTX 3090 graphics cards have had some serious price cuts recently, and they are likely to continue being slashed as we get nearer to the Lovelace launch. While the original MSRP was $1,499, most retailers now have the official price of the graphics card set to around $1,260 (£1,100) give or take, and on the Nvidia website you can find the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity OC for as little as $1140 (£999).
The RTX 3090 can also be found installed in PCs from third-party manufacturers, like MSI, Dell, and Asus. These companies buy the cards in bulk, so pricing will obviously depend on whether you purchase the card on its own or as part of a whole system.
The GeForce RTX 4090 will be introduced at 24GB of GDDR6X memory and promises to be twice as fast as the 3090 Ti, the most powerful GPU on the market until October 12, 2022, when the RTX 4090 is released at $1,599 (around £1,400 or AU$2,400).
Performance
In our review of the RTX 3090, we were able to test out just how powerful the card was, and we were definitely not disappointed. The RTX 3090 is a powerful graphics card in its own right, and was the best-performing graphics card on the market before the release of the RTX 3090 Ti. It still holds its own, and we can look at its performance and predict what the 4090 would be capable of.
In our benchmarks, the RTX 3090 provided an impressive report card in-game and with synthetic testing software. Without ray tracing in Metro Exodus at max settings in 4K, we saw an average of 76fps as well as 54fps in Total War: Three Kingdoms with 4K Ultra settings. The RTX 3090 was clearly a GPU where you could whack graphical settings to max, and not worry about performance.
The scores the graphics card produced in our benchmarking software were just as beastly. The RTX 3090 had scores of 9,955, 12,469, and 13,875 respectively in TimeSpy Extreme, Fire Strike Ultra, and Port Royal. Compared to the RTX 3080 these are around 1,000 points higher in every category.
The RTX 4090 is expected to surpass that and then some, which would be a huge leap in the world of GPUs. According to leaker kopite7kimi, the RTX 4090 should be able to achieve a score of more than 19,000 on Time Spy Extreme, which would make it one of the fastest GPUs out there with nearly double the score of the RTX 3090. Other rumors suggest that the RTX 4090 may be able to hit 4K resolutions and 160 frames per second with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. If these specifications are true, gamers lucky enough to snag an RTX 4090 should be very pleased.
While it’s too early to say definitively which one is the better pick until we get hold of the RTX 4090, we do think that the RTX 3090 would still hold its ground amongst many other GPUs, especially if it continues to drop in price.
The Ada Lovelace series evolves all three RTX processors to promise to double and even quadruple the performance of previous generations. On top of that Nvidia showcased their new GPU technology called Shader Execution Reordering which hopes to increase ray-tracing performance three times over what we have now.
The performance promised by the RTX 4090 is way beyond what most consumers would actually need, and it will likely be an enthusiasts-only card. But if you want the most powerful gaming GPU ever made - and have the budget for it - then the RTX 4090 could be your dream graphics card.
Power Draw
Rumors point to the RTX 4090 being a power-hungry monster, a potential beast with a bottomless belly. It's expected to require up to 660W of power with a base TGP of 450W, potentially more when pushed to its limit via overclocking. This amount of power presents an issue in times when energy bills are set to soar and people become even more conscious of their energy consumption.
The RTX 3090 slurps up 385W, which is almost half of what the RTX 4090 is said to need. While this is just a rumour, and we haven't been given any specifications from the launch yet, so we can work with this assumption.
This massive power draw may add to your energy bills in a significant way, so it’s worth considering if the new graphics card is really worth it.
Should you buy it?
The big question is this: should you buy the RTX 4090 when it releases?
If you’re someone who wants the absolute best of the best, aiming to push your gaming performance to the limit, this might be the card for you. The RTX 4090 is for the enthusiast that wants to play AAA games with out-of-this-world performance at high resolutions.
However, not many people actually need this sort of power, and for the price the RTX 4090 will be asking for it just doesn’t seem worth it. Not many people will be able to afford a GPU at that price, and may not have to as the cost of the RTX 3090 and other RTX cards continues to plummet and will likely do so for the foreseeable future.
We can’t say much more until we can get our hands on it, but with what we know we can expect a very expensive piece of gear that may be nice to drool over - just not a very practical purchase.
