Nvidia RTX 4090 Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The performance is there, no doubt about that, but it does, of course, come at a heck of a cost. The Nvidia RTX 4090 is available on the Nvidia.com website with prices starting at £1,679, but custom cards will most often than not be above that. The Gigabyte card is £1829.99 in the UK and likely around $1599 in the US. The MSI card is suspected to be £1929 and $1699 respectively. Not cheap, actually, bonkers money really. However, the cost per frame tells us its relative value £ to FPS is excellent. We actually saw a 6% increase in cost if going for the Gigabyte 4090 over the 3090 Ti in the UK when looking at the cost per frame which overall, isn’t that bad considering this is bleeding-edge, new technology. The MSI comes in slightly higher at around 11% more per frame than a 3090 Ti. That’s before we factor in other advantages like RT and DLSS improvements.

In the US, the story is actually dramatically better with the Gigabyte 4090 only costing 1.7% more per frame than the 3090 Ti while the more expensive MSI card sits around 7% higher per frame. Sure $1700 is a lot to pay for a GPU but it just feels like you get a LOT for your money and things are only going to get better as games are optimised for the technology, DLSS3 becomes more prevalent, and any power limit bugs are ironed out.

Overview

This review has been a wild ride, as while the price is a bitter pill to choke on, one can not argue with the raw performance of these new cards. Like, at all, as Nvidia said they were “beyond fast” and I’m inclined to agree. I’ll even go to doubt AMD can counter with similar performance, this is a real leap forward in terms of performance. Not that AMD has to compete for the flagship crown, it just has to strike a stronger price-to-performance metric a little further down the range.

More to Come

I think we still have a lot of testing ahead of us to see what these cards can really do, so, that’s what we’re doing right now as you read this. We’ve got 30 games to test, 15 more than are featured here, and at more resolutions that may even include 8K, with even more of that available on our Patreon. We’ll be diving into 500Hz monitor gaming, DLSS 3.0, Ray Tracing and more in great depth over the coming days and no doubt weeks as updates and more hardware rolls through the office. Oh, and expect proper reviews of each GPU, so you can get a proper closer look at those too. Also, as mentioned, we may need to retest the MSI card if and when it comes back to us, as MSI took it before a fix was made, so it was kind of out of our hands with that one and yes, we did plead with them, but they had their own reason behind it all.

Beyond Fast

Nvidia has raised the bar here, in terms of raw rendering performance, more advanced and powerful ray tracing processing and new innovations for DLSS. It’s interesting to see that with performance being between 40-60% above that of the 3090 Ti, prices are actually up by around the same gen-vs-gen, albeit, that’s for founders cards, not the much more expensive custom ones we’ve just tested. Regardless, we do hope to see those come down in the coming months regardless. However, while we need to do more testing, DLSS 3.0 could be the thing that really widens that performance gap, as it’s only available on 4000 series cards, unfortunately.

Should I Buy One?

It’s been one of the coolest products we’ve ever had the joy of testing. Bigger, faster, strong, cooler, and many other things which make this sound like a Daft Punk song. Nvidia promised it would be #BeyondFast and I’ll be damned if they didn’t deliver. Sure, it needs more power, it’s going to take a huge PC case, and a big cash investment. However, once you fire up your favourite game and max out everything, you’ll be grinning from ear to ear, I know I was! With RDNA3 coming from AMD, and Nvidia still rolling out the RTX 4080 cards in the coming weeks and months, the GPU market has gotten very exciting indeed.