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.