Nvidia RTX 4090 Graphics Card Review

Control

So looking at Control, we can see that performance took a 37% decrease once Ray Tracing was enabled but enabling DLSS and utilising the 1440p resolution to upscale from, allowed performance to dramatically gain by 87%. The most interesting talking point here is that with Ray Tracing enabled and DLSS on, you now have a visually stunning-looking game with 16% more performance than with Ray Tracing off.

On top of this, those new RT cores really do a great job which sees a 47% uplift when compared to the 3090 Ti when just Ray Tracing is enabled and a 59% uplift compared to the 3090 Ti when looking at performance with Ray Tracing and DLSS both enabled.

Cyberpunk 2077

Moving onto Cyberpunk and I want to choose my words carefully because while we did see a 45% decrease when enabling Ray Tracing, the more important thing to notice is that enabling DLSS sees us with Cyberpunk at 4K on the Ultra preset with Ray Tracing set to Ultra getting 78 frames per second from our MSI card. This is almost like the stuff dreams are made of but the comparison gets even better because by my calculations we actually lose only 0.9% when going from Cyberpunk with no Ray Tracing to Cyberpunk with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled and with DLSS3 available on the 40 series cards, it’s something that we could go into for hours, so we’ll be creating more content solely focussed on the even bigger results that has to offer.

Watchdogs Legion

Finally in Watch Dogs: Legion we see a 39% decrease in performance to get those shiny reflections, which frankly looks awesome in the game to only seeing a 4.2% decrease from the original pure rasterisation result to having Ray Tracing and DLSS set to quality. Compared to the 3090 Ti with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled, we now see a 55% performance gain when moving up to the 4090. Again, the stuff that dreams are made of.

So pretty impressive stuff. I mean, who am I kidding, it’s pretty damn crazy seeing these huge gains in performance and while I get that not everyone is keen on DLSS and the way it does things, even at 4K, it just looks simply stunning and not having these huge hits in performance now is just next level stuff.