NVIDIA has just lifted the review embargo for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 is the flagship GPU from the green team, and we’ve decided to benchmark it in 4K on the 30 most demanding PC games. Can this new graphics card offer smooth 4K gaming performance? Time to find out.
For our benchmarks, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 Founders Edition. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 521.90 driver.
As we’ve said and before, we here at DSOGaming have pretty high standards. For us, a 4K GPU is a graphics card that can at least push a minimum of 60fps (and not an average of 60fps). And, as you can see below, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is indeed a 4K GPU (at least for today’s games).
In pure rasterized games, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is 100% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. This is something that NVIDIA hinted at its Overwatch 2 benchmarks. And yes, we can confirm that the RTX 4090 is a rasterized beast.
Believe it or not, in some rare cases, we were CPU-limited even in 4K with Ultra settings. Let this sink in. We’re talking about CPU bottlenecks in 4K resolutions. Some examples of this are Watch Dogs: Legion, Crysis Remastered and Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Let’s take a look now at the benchmarks. At native 4K with Ultra settings, Total War Warhammer 3 runs with a minimum of 73fps. Assetto Corsa Competizione with max cars and nighty storm conditions runs silky smooth. Crysis 3 Remastered can also finally run at constant 100fps.
It’s also interesting to look at Godfall, Quantum Break and Cyberpunk 2077. These three games were VRAM-limited by our RTX3080 (they required more than 10GB of VRAM). In these three games, we saw tremendous performance improvements (thanks to the 24GB of the RTX 4090).
But what about Ray Tracing games? Again, we benchmarked all of the following games at native 4K. No DLSS 2 and no FSR 2.0. These are native 4K/Max Ray Tracing results. Quake 2 RTX runs with a minimum of 73fps in native 4K. Saints Row and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are silky smooth. And even the most unoptimized Ray Tracing games, like The Ascent or The Medium are playable (as they run with more than 30fps). Again, these are native 4K results (just look at the RTX 3080 numbers).
Before closing, we should note that the GPU never passed 73 degrees Celcius (with fans in auto mode). We also did not experience any stability issues, and did not encounter any crashes. For those wondering, we do not use an ATX 3.0 PSU. We have a 1000W Corsair PSU which we bought when we built our current PC system with the Intel i9 9900K. NVIDIA has provided a 4×8-pin adaptor which works perfectly. We were even able to overclock our GPU to 2.92Ghz. So, if you already have a quality PSU, you’ll be fine.
All in all, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a beast in both rasterized and ray-traced games. This is the best graphics card you can buy right now. And yes, for the first time, we have a truly 4K GPU (again, for today’s games).
The MSRP price of the RTX 4090 is $1599. To be honest, though, I expect most stores to up the prices (considering how good this GPU actually is). So, if you can find it at its MSRP, you should definitely get it. For $2K (or higher)… well… that’s a tough sell. Also, if you currently own an RTX 3080 and you game at 1440p, there is no reason at all to upgrade to an RTX 4090. Let’s also not forget that AMD will announce its RDNA 3 GPUs on November 3rd. However, I don’t really know whether the red team will be able to match the performance of the RTX 4090.
Make also sure to read our DLSS 3 article here.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Looks perfect for my VR and 4k wants.
I fear these will sell in out seconds and I won’t be able to get one for retail price.
Crypto is down and seminconductor production is ramping up.
Won’t happen
I hope you are right but I think you underestimate the amount of gamers like myself that have held off buying and waiting for the 4090.
Most any content creator with the funds will pick this a 40 series for just the AV1 alone, let alone being able to run higher fps while streaming. The thing that gets me, is this card can push 600 fps in 4k on some new games like OW2 and Valorant, yet can only output 120 hz/fps in 4k due to DP1.4 limitation. Really sad as the 200 dollar Intel cards have this feature. Not sure what NVidia is thinking putting out a card that can pump more frames at a resolution than it can output…
What is the advantage in av1? I know zero about encoding
No one will buy these cards. So don’t worry, they’ll be in stock. Many people are not into Nvidia shield they foolishness. Ain’t nobody but enthusiast with money to burn buying these.
Looks perfect for my VR and 4k wants.
I fear these will sell in out seconds and I won’t be able to get one for retail price.
Impressive. Shame it didn’t come out before I played through Watch dogs legion. Hard to justify getting one when I look at my remaining backlog (my 3080 ti copes just fine maxed at 4K at 70-100 fps by and large). Still, I like shiny things. Will wait for a game bundle though to sweeten the deal.
Dude you could still sell the 3080 ti for a good price because of the prices of these cards. I’m debating it right now.
I am going to wait till next year and see if this drops half in price like the 3090 ti, then the money I saved in the meantime I can use to fund the electricity in the future. JK of course, personal GPU power draw limit set at 350w, which is already too much to justify for gaming.
If it wasn’t the size of a mini fridge, and require a dedicated nuclear power plant to run it, I may have considered one. I’ll happily skip this gen of Nvidia.
Yep, I also skipping this generation its a complete joke. So far I can 4k gaming all my games I play with just 1660 ti gaming x LMFAO. Why would I downgrade myself to such nonsense as that
What an insane troll bait.
4090 is a superb product but I agree. I prefer my GPU looking slim and simple. Also, the price is just insanely high, the cheapest model I could find costs around $1811.
I have a 3090TI…peaks @ ~445W power! Not sure how I ended up making the decision to buy it! 😀
Let me get this straight ? Nvidia making video cards of a size of ps5 (that already looks stupid as hell) and now they releasing this card that probably will drain so much electricity goodluck paying for energy bills at the end of the month LMFAO. So they said f@k it POWER=SIZE and just making whatever now ? Where is the talk like back then, not even needing GPU in the future LMFAO yeah sure https://media2.giphy.com/media/l41Yhts9fcQnT1Z28/giphy.gif
AMD troll
I like gaming…but not $1600 GPU’s worth. I have a 3080 and 5900X, but man there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to spend on a single part.
Hah more like $1811. That is not even the best model.
The truth is, RTX cards were not designed for outdated raster-titles at first, NVIDIA has made this clear many years ago, but due to sad devs, etc. outcry due to their very poor untalented skills, old-school rasterization titles are still here.
sometimes they are held back by the backward compatibility to preserve for ps4 gen
Even the conSLOWS supported RT, etc., at launch 2-years-ago but many of these *dumb* devs still do not support RT, etc. in their so-called “next-gen titles” at launch-day e.g. Elden Ring, HITMAN 3 (intial launch 1/21), The Last *Woke* Of Us-Demake Pt 1 (but it will be taxed up to $100+ ?), Halo… on and ON!
So, the go-to excuse, “blame the conSLOWS”, do not work anymore for the WISE. ?
then write them an email
Yeah, right! ?
Anyway, it is NOT our job to save these *dumb* devs from themselves and besides, many (if not all) don’t give a s4!t enough to care to listen to constructive criticism or any feedback, hence, all the terrible / worthless titles on the market.
I understand you…if you are in the industry…because in another industry i have direct experience that the staff are very often populated with reccommended lazy morons deprived of any skills, but we can do little about it
They or at least managers dont listen to feedback because they dint care and because no capacity to bring required amendements quickly
I understand you…if you are in the industry…because in another industry i have direct experience that the staff are very often populated with reccommended lazy morons deprived of any skills, but we can do little about it
These unexperienced underskilled staff or at least managers dont listen to feedback because they dont care and because no capacity to bring required amendements quickly and so they dont care
We must not buy when we hear of poor performance in their operas
Gonna buy one to play Fortnite
I doubt you can afford a USB flash drive LMFAO
Being a member of the Fortnite 2 +500fps master race is truly something we should all aspire to.
fortnite all maxed up is not a daisy…and its unreal 5
“For our benchmarks, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4”
bottlenecked
Digital foundry and Gamers Nexus were both running top end CPU’s, 12900k’s and ran into the same bottlenecks.
“same”
Yeah, they ran into the same issue of CPU bottlenecks even with the fastest CPU’s currently on the market. What’s your point exactly?
4090 is simply too fast.
Where i find the article?
digital foundry they sometimes make setup mistakes, but ill have a look at it…
you know by the way this card was announced as a pci 5 and its not? its only pci 4
it may depend on many factor, maybe as the article says this was the real headroom of the card, but also too young drivers
however i9 9900k is a bottleneck to this gpu
Youre totally right. I changed my 8700K to 12900K and still my 3080 got heavily bottlenecked before. I nearly got that in all games iam playing like newest Battlefield game, Control, Quantum Break, Watch Dogs Legion, Spiderman, Forza Horizon 5 and much more. I discovered it specially on scenes with many Objects or NPCs for example. A good example are the places in Spiderman when there are many trees and many people are in sight or by night when there are many lightsources…with my 8700K i got constant stuttering which are gone now. Even raytracing benefits from it in Control or Ghostrunner.
Its because the cpu is in charge for drawing the poligonal scene and actors on every frame…the gpu will have to sit and wait and if it has to…framerate will skip…and below the vrr range, unless you have a hardware gsync which could compensate having no lower vrr end, a solution could be intensify the workload on the gpu that would decrease framerate but reduce stuttering….it could be achieved by increasing rendering resolution ( like if you are in 4k the gpu is set to render internally in 5k but output to 4k ) so that the cycles per unit of time of both components come closer…take this as a deduction, not the outcome of a test conducted in rigorous manner
But i doubt that switching from low to high settings has any positive effect…if you lower the load on gpu, still you either bring its clock very down or she flies happily even faster…
Again best solution i think lowering geometry complexity to minimum and then increase, as that affects directly the cpu performance, gpu makes no geometry calculation…for this i laugh when i read…” an i5 is sufficient for games” yes depends on games and resolution, not open world games
With the global recession, PC sales down and stocks collapsing I very well doubt prices will increase for the 4090. If anything prices will drop by early next year.
No one is buying video cards anymore, at least no where near the highs of the past 2 years.
All the chip buyers like Intel/AMD/Nvidia are overstocked because of overestimated projections.
EDIT: Thanks to zeroax1s for highlighting my error in having mistaken which series GPU introduced ray tracing. Post deleted!
Whats the point of all that power, when electricity bills gonna go thru the roof and the size of it LMFAO most of cases wont even have space for that garbage
I heard Linus took extra gym classes just so he could pick up a RTX 4090 and hold it to camera! /jk
actually Hardware Unboxed has proven 4090 to be quite efficient. The problem is like you said, you will need a bigger PC case and a higher grade PSU (preferably 1000W Plat).
You got your gens off. 2000 introduced ray tracing and barely performed better than 1000. 3000s vastly improved upon 2000.
My bad! So I guess I was a little harsh on this new card then.
Looked at the benchmarks from Hardware Unboxed, compared to a 3090 Ti, it’s a 37.25% difference in 4K. The performance simply isn’t that impressive when you look at history: Ampere was 40% faster than Turing on launch, Turing at 30% faster than Pascal on launch, Pascal was 50% faster than Maxwell on launch. Include the fact that you’re now paying dramatically more to get this historically average gen bump and that the 4090 runs at 23.23% higher wattage compared to the 3090’s base TDP and you have a genuinely unimpressive product in regards to price/perf and watt/perf efficiency. The fanboys & sheep have once again lost the plot with this one.
wtf are you saying? this card is a monster….the only problem here is the price!
guarda non si vede per niente dallo username che siamo concittadini
Sei de Roma bro?
Daje
RTX doesn’t mean rasterized. If that were the case, NVIDIA would have just stuck with the
GeForce… GTX label.No one today is about to purchase up to a $2000+ card and care about only rasterized titles, hell, they could get that easy with a 1080Ti+. ?
+ the cost of a new PC case (need bigger space) and a new PSU to power up that massive beast. Most people won’t own a 4090.
the irony is that this time there dont seem to be same supply issues as series 30
the irony is that this time there dont seem to be same supply issues as series 30
the gtx label you mean…but i got you and agree, also, dlss is not connected mandatorily with ray tracing
Got a brand new dual-slot 3080 Ti for $710. I think John is right. As a 1440p user, I’m perfectly happy with a 3080Ti. 4090 is the new King of GPU and ideal for 4K gamers (especially if you’re into VR).
This looks like GTX 400 series all over again. Insane power draw. Insane heat. Insane price hike. I’ll be passing on this series too.
If someone play at 1440p and will lock performance to reasonable 90fps then power draw is much lower compared to 3090ti. What’s also interesting with powerdraw set to 60% 4090 is 300W card and performance is just 10% slower.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0ca2f9981c46fd37a21c8c25101fcd93e036379673d0b2027f21b597de2dd769.png
9900K is a bottleneck these days and doesn’t cut it for GPU reviews or benchmarks in general. Time to upgrade John.
preorder $2,000 Newegg. I love gaming but not that much. Going to make my 3060ti last for another 8 years lol.
That’s the spirit man. Wish more people would do this. Because no matter how crazy the card is that you get, they are still a waste of money at this point. The games are all unoptimized rubbish.
And everyone here is stating their decisions based on a not even flagship but a halo product (facepalm).
Either stay with older gen graphics card or wait for 50-series, that’s my advise.