Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. Meet the RTX 4090 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Cyberpunk 20778. Days Gone9. Dying Light 210. Far Cry 611. Forza Horizon 512. God of War13. Horizon Zero Dawn14. Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Resident Evil Village17. Total War: Warhammer III18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered22. Ray Tracing: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition23. Ray Tracing: Resident Evil Village24. Clock Speed25. GPU Temperatures26. Acoustics27. Noise-Normalised Temperatures28. Power Draw: 1080p29. Power Draw: 1440p30. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)31. Performance per Watt: 1080p32. Performance per Watt: 1440p33. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)34. Total System Power Draw35. Overclocking36. Closing Thoughts37. View All Pages

Here we present frame rate figures for each graphics card, averaged across all 12 games on test today. These figures can disguise significant variations in performance from game to game, but provide a useful overview of the sort of performance you can expect at each resolution tested.

Taking a look at the big picture overview, the RTX 4090 goes straight to the top of the chart as we would expect. At 1440p it delivers an average of 202FPS, and that makes it 48% faster on average compared to the RTX 3090 Ti. Against the RTX 3090, we're looking at a 63% uplift, while it's exactly 50% faster than AMD's current fastest, the RX 6950 XT.

You really do need to be playing at 4K to get the most from the silicon, however. At this resolution, the RTX 4090 can stretch its legs and comes in 60% faster on average compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, a hugely impressive gen-on-gen uplift. It's also 80% faster than the vanilla RTX 3090, quite a staggering figure really considering that GPU was the fastest on the market up until March this year.

It's worth taking a closer look at the comparison between the RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 Ti at 4K. While we see a 60% uplift on average, some games scale significantly better than others, as we can see above. Days Gone and Far Cry 6, for instance, are relatively poor performers, and while there's a good stack of games in that 50-60% range, we do see a couple pushing over 70% versus the 3090 Ti.

As always, we recommend checking out other reviews to get as wide of a sample range as possible. Depending on the games in question, overall performance numbers versus the likes of the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT will vary.

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