Nvidia RTX 4090 Graphics Card Review

Peter Donnell / 2 years ago

When it comes to PC gaming, a pretty modest and affordable graphics card will go a lot further than you might think. A card that’s a few generations old, or something much further down the range will play great. Actually, we retested the GTX 1070 Ti recently to prove this. Andy tested more old and current cards recently too, which you can check here. However, one of the advantages of PC gaming is that the sky is the limit, and if you’re eager to push extreme resolutions, refresh rates, and ultra graphics with no compromise, well… you can do that too. Sure, the graphics card, such as the new Nvidia RTX 4090 series aren’t cheap, if anything, they’re just getting more expensive. However, by the time you invest in a CPU, motherboard, monitor and other hardware that can fully realise the potential of these new cards, it’s safe to say it’s less for your average gamer and more for sports, professionals and deep-pocketed enthusiasts. Of course, that’s true of many hobbies, and in a way, the RTX 4090 is the F1 car of graphics cards.

Nvidia RTX 4090

We’ve got two cards going all-out today, the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X Graphics Card and the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC Graphics Card. Both of these are very high-end models, so I’m expecting nothing but the best here. Make no mistake, spec-for-spec, these are the two most powerful GPUs we’ve ever tested, by a long way, so I think the benchmarks will tell us what we already know. However, I am eager to see if there’s much difference between the two.

These cards require new power connectors to deal with their increased power consumption. They have the largest GPU coolers I’ve ever seen to tame that monster of a chipset. They’re massive too, so many mid-towers like won’t even support them. Everything is next-level here. But with prices around £1600-2000+ for an RTX 4090, anything less than flawless performance will not be tolerated.

Features

16384 NVIDIA CUDA Cores
2.23 GHz Base Clock
2.52 GHz Boost Clock
24 GB Memory Size
GDDR6X Memory
PCIe Gen 4.0 Interface
384-bit Memory Interface
3rd Gen Ray Tracing Cores
4th Gen Tensor Cores
Ada Lovely Architecture

Additional Technologies

DLSS 3.0
Nvidia Reflex
Nvidia Broadcast
Resizable BAR
GeForce Experience
Nvidia Ansel
Nvidia FreeStyle
Nvidia ShadowPlay
Nvidia Highlights
Nvidia G-Sync

DLSS 3.0

DLSS is a revolutionary breakthrough in AI-powered graphics that massively boosts performance. Powered by the new fourth-gen Tensor Cores and Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, DLSS 3 uses AI to create additional high-quality frames.

We’re focusing on straight-up rendering performance for this feature though, and we’ll follow up with a dedicated dive into DLSS very soon!

Beyond Fast

“The NVIDIA® GeForce RTX® 4090 is the ultimate GeForce GPU. It brings an enormous leap in performance, efficiency, and AI-powered graphics. Experience ultra-high-performance gaming, incredibly detailed virtual worlds, unprecedented productivity, and new ways to create. It’s powered by the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture and comes with 24 GB of G6X memory to deliver the ultimate experience for gamers and creators.” – Nvidia