Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 - A spherical horse in a vacuum

On October 12, 2022 Nvidia introduced to the world the GeForce RTX 4090, GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4080. And no, this is not a typo, GeForce RTX 4080andGeForce RTX 4080 are two different graphics cards with the same name, but with different amount of video memory: in one 16GB, its recommended price is $1199, the other 12GB for $899.

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, once again spoke at the presentation of his new brainchild. A polished visuals, amazing, exciting technology - this is what such speeches are famous for. And Jensen didn't blow it, GeForce RTX 4090 is really the most powerful video card, but is it all so unambiguous?

Dry numbers, DLSS 3.0 and third generation RTX

The first thing to take into account - GeForce RTX 4090 is built on a new architecture and is equipped with a graphics processor AD102. The video chip itself has 76.3 billion transistors, while in the three thousandth series of video cards (GeForce RTX 3090) there were only 28.3 billion. At the same time, the area of the video chip itself has only decreased.

The GeForce RTX 4090 has an impressive 16384 CUDA cores instead of 10496 on the GeForce RTX 3090, but both cards have 24GB of GDDR6X version video memory with 21Gbps bandwidth. The GeForce RTX 3090 has 328 tensor blocks and 82 ray tracing blocks versus 512 tensor blocks and 128 RTX blocks on the GeForce RTX 4090. In fact, the GeForce RTX 4090 is 2-4 times more powerful than the previous generation card, which is what Jensen Huang emphasized:

If we exaggerate all the dry numbers, which will tell the consumer little without a proper technical knowledge base, then this is a simple table:

1. GeForce RTX 4090 - 82,6 Teraflops.
2. GeForce RTX 3090 - 35,6 Teraflops.

For comparison, the most powerful console of the last generation - Xbox Series X - has 12 teraflops, and PlayStation 5 has only 10.28 teraflops. That is, in fact GeForce RTX 4090 is almost seven times more powerful than the best console in the world, and almost two and a half times more powerful than the GeForce RTX 3090, as we were also helpfully reminded by the CEO of Nvidia. Also Jensen Huang showed an entertaining table of power gains:

Deep Learning Scale Stabilization (DLSS) in GeForce RTX 4090 has been upgraded to version 3.0. The ray tracing technology has also been upgraded to the third generation:

RTX is great with DLSS 3.0. It is with RTX that all performance tests were conducted. To clearly demonstrate the power of DLSS 3.0 we chose one of the most demanding games of today - Cyberpunk 2077:

Until now we mentioned only the official information from Nvidia themselves, and what were the results after independent tests? After all, no company in the world in their right mind will not discredit themselves...

Performance tests by independent reviewers

After buying GeForce RTX 4090, it is reasonable to wonder if they lied to me. Looking ahead, no. There were very few lies in the presentation, and getting ahead of ourselves, some information was preferred not to be announced to us...

In many ways GeForce RTX 4090 was designed as a pure gamer graphics card. Nvidia even made some researches which showed that on the monitor with 240 Hz refresh rate the player will get 3% advantage. According to Nvidia themselves, it is these 3% separates victory from defeat in the fiercest virtual battles. And here GeForce RTX 4090 shows some cosmic FPS values in the most popular multiplayer games:

As for single-player games, the GeForce RTX 4090 shows impressive results. The 3DMARK program was used to simulate the performance of modern games:

And everything seems great, but something tells me you didn't come here for a flattering review...

The pitfalls of GeForce RTX 4090

...but came in for criticism.

At their presentation Nvidia showed the GeForce RTX 4090 only with RTX enabled, showed DLSS 3.0, but kept silent about raw performance. That is, the one that most gamers use on a regular basis. At the moment there are no games with which GeForce RTX 4090 is not able to cope on ultra settings. Even after overclocking the graphics card does not heat up more than 76°, and the power consumption ranges around 450-528W, which is impressive in combination with such characteristics. In addition, the GeForce RTX 4090 will also fit a power supply of only 500W, which seems kind of surreal, but it's true; the graphics card cooling is top-notch.

However, the power of the GeForce RTX 4090 also plays against the graphics card itself. Imagine that you noticed a dirty, sewer rat in the house and instead of putting a mousetrap, shot the whole house with an automatic rifle in the hope of hitting the small carcass - with GeForce RTX 4090 the situation is similar.

GeForce RTX 4090 is too powerful for the vast majority of tasks. So, for example, monitors with screen refresh rate of not less than 240 Hz will be able to reveal the potential of the graphics card. GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 3090 were tested in all games in all situations, GeForce RTX 4090 shows much more impressive results: in Red Dead Redemption 2 we see stable 100 FPS on ultra settings without DLSS 3.0, with DLSS turned on - 135 and more.

However, DLSS 3.0 is not a magic bullet. To integrate this technology, the developer must personally contact Nvidia and sign a contract; hence, many indie developers are out of luck. And the list of games and applications supporting DLSS 3.0 itself is not impressive:

The second point: GeForce RTX 4090 did not hit the needs of the population at all. In an era of economic crisis, people need budget and practical graphics cards. Jensen Huang once said: "A graphics card should cost like a console" and put a price tag of $1,599... A very consistent man, no doubt...

In 2021 they put a similar price tag on the GeForce RTX 3090, but 2021 was remembered by many for the mining boom, when video cards were used not only for gameplay, rendering and heavyweight applications, but also for earning cryptocurrency. In 2021 the payback of video cards among miners was unprecedented, and in 2022 after the well-known sad events mining became almost unprofitable. On a wave of hype around mining played and Nvidia, they could set the price convenient to them, but those times are behind us, and the prices of graphics cards in the norm did not come. If you live in countries where buying a graphics card will involve a huge overpayment, then don't be surprised if the price tag on the GeForce RTX 4090 goes up to $3000. But what do we get for that money?

And we get a graphics card whose lion's share of power will remain in reserve for years to come. For the gamers the GeForce RTX 3090 is good enough, but we are not expecting any breakthrough in graphics for the next 4 years at least. All games are developed in order to run on the console at least at an acceptable level. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will not let the video game industry to go to 8K resolution, and GeForce RTX 4090 is urgent to get exactly for it.

But what prevents the consumer to wait a couple of years and buy GeForce RTX 4090 at the time when the games will move en masse to 8K, as in its time moved from FullHD to 4K? Recall: This process has been going on for years and only relatively recently in the TV and monitors with 4K resolution appeared the real demand.

So what will the GeForce RTX 4090 be good for? Well, this graphics card is great for those who do 3D modeling professionally, for gaming aesthetes with bags of money, but not for miners anymore. Mining payback GeForce RTX 4090 - 5-10 years without power, and given the general problem with energy - payback in mining do not have to wait.

And now the question: isn't the GeForce RTX 4090 a bit too niche for its price?