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

The last two years have felt like an eternity in the graphics card market, with almost the entire GPU generation facing supply shortages, scalper prices and insatiable demand from cryptocurrency miners. Today, however, heralds the start of something new. The next GPU generation is about to kick off, with Nvidia unveiling its Ada Lovelace architecture and RTX 40-series at GTC last month.

We can now present our review of the flagship RTX 4090, packing 76.3 billion transistors, 16384 CUDA Cores and a boost clock that exceeds 2.5GHz…

	RTX 4090	RTX 3090 Ti	RTX 3090	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3080
Process	TSMC 4N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N
SMs	128	84	82	80	68
CUDA Cores	16384	10752	10496	10240	8704
Tensor Cores	512	336	328	320	272
RT Cores	128	84	82	80	68
Texture Units	512	336	328	320	272
ROPs	176	112	112	112	96
GPU Boost Clock	2520 MHz	1860 MHz	1695 MHz	1665 MHz	1710 MHz
Memory Data Rate	21 Gbps	21 Gbps	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	19 Gbps
L2 Cache	73729 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	5120 KB
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1008 GB/Sec	1008 GB/Sec	936 GB/Sec	912 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec
TGP	450W	450W	350W	350W	320W

Unlike the launch of the RTX 30-series back in September 2020, where Nvidia kicked off the new generation with the RTX 3080 and then followed it up with the RTX 3090, this time around it is the big boy being released first – the RTX 4090. Two RTX 4080 SKUs are on the way but won't be landing until next month, and after that… well, your guess is as good as mine.

Still, with the RTX 4090, Nvidia hopes to inject new life into the GPU market. Switching from Samsung 8nm to TSMC 4nm has allowed the manufacturer to vastly increase transistor count, up from 28.3 billion with GA102, to a staggering 76.3 billion with the largest Ada GPU, AD102. Accordingly, core count has gone through the roof, with the RTX 4090 home to 16384 CUDA cores, with 512 Tensor cores and 128 RT cores, with a sizeable increase to the ROP count too, up to 176.

Such a leap forward in process node has also allowed Nvidia to crank the clock speed significantly, with the RTX 4090 now sporting a 2520MHz rated boost clock. Most of the Ampere generation ran at around 1800MHz, so that is really quite a generational improvement.

Memory configuration, however, is almost identical to the RTX 3090 Ti, with 24GB GDDR6X running at 21Gbps, operating over 384-bit interface, totalling memory bandwidth of just over 1TB/s. That said, there has been a substantial upgrade to the L2 cache with the Ada architecture, with the RTX 4090 now offering 73MB, compared to 6MB for GA102.

Power draw also remains at 450W, as per the RTX 3090 Ti, but we are using our updated GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

To view all pages of this review, click HERE.

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