Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is the brand new flagship of a new era of Nvidia graphics playing cards primarily based on its Ada Lovelace structure. It brings with it new applied sciences, new enhancements, and a giant uplift usually GPU efficiency. It’s seeking to assist the following era of video games with huge enhancements to ray tracing and deep studying tremendous sampling (DLSS) efficiency specifically.
Undoubtedly set to prime our checklist of the strongest GPUs you should buy, right here’s every thing you must know in regards to the Nvidia RTX 4090.
Pricing and launch date
Nvidia debuted the RTX 4090 in its GTC keynote deal with on September 20, revealing that the brand new card will launch on October 12, with a worth of $1,599. It is going to be joined later by the RTX 4080, however no clear launch date for that card was revealed.
This worth is way decrease than the unique predictions urged, with some leaks claiming it will be north of $2,000. Nonetheless, it’s clear from Nvidia’s continued promotion of its RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 that it might not have lower-tier Lovelace playing cards for a while, as an alternative utilizing current inventory of the RTX 3000-series to flesh out its GPU lineup in the intervening time.
Specs
Nvidia’s debut of the RTX 4090 solely revealed probably the most key specs for the cardboard, however a full spec sheet adopted shortly after and confirmed lots of the rumors and leaks of latest months.
| RTX 4090 | RTX 3090 | |
| Structure | Ada Lovelace | Ampere |
| Course of node | 4nm TSMC | 8nm Samsung |
| CUDA cores | 16,384 | 10,496 |
| Ray tracing cores | 144 Third-gen (rumored) | 82 2nd-gen |
| Tensor cores | 576 4th-gen (rumored) | 328 Third-gen |
| Base clock pace | 2235MHz | 1394MHz |
| Enhance clock pace | 2520MHz | 1695MHz |
| VRAM GDDR6X | 24GB | 24GB |
| Reminiscence pace | 21Gbps (rumored) | 19.5Gbps |
| Bus width | 384-width | 384-width |
| TDP | 450W | 350W |
The RTX 4090 relies on Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace structure constructed on the most recent TSMC 4nm course of. That permits for unprecedented effectivity and a way more compact design. The RTX 4090 has greater than 50% extra CUDA cores than the RTX 3090, and it manages that whereas growing clock speeds dramatically. Reminiscence configurations are a lot the identical, with 24GB of GDDR6X operating with a 384-bit width. Although Nvidia has but to disclose the pace of the brand new card’s reminiscence, it’s rumored to run on the similar 21Gbps because the RTX 3090 Ti.
The ability necessities for the 4090 have elevated, as anticipated, although to not the extent that some rumors urged. At 450W, it’s 100W greater than the RTX 3090 however the identical because the RTX 3090 Ti.
Nvidia additionally confirmed that the Lovelace GPU will profit from new-generation RT and tensor cores. It has but to explicitly verify the variety of both, however one graph did counsel that it had massively elevated the variety of each on the RTX 4090.
Efficiency
With far more CUDA cores, greater clock speeds, and new-generation RT and tensor cores, it’s no shock that the RTX 4090 can ship a giant uplift in sport efficiency. Though we’ll need to watch for third-party benchmarks to make any definitive claims, Nvidia is promising rather a lot from basic rasterization, ray tracing, and particularly when leveraging the brand new DLSS 3 upscaling algorithm.
Nvidia claims that the RTX 4090 ought to ship round two occasions the efficiency of the RTX 3090 usually gaming and as much as 4 occasions the efficiency in ray traced video games when DLSS 3 is utilized.
From a uncooked efficiency perspective, Nvidia claims its Lovelace line of GPUs will supply as a lot as 90 TFLOPs of uncooked compute efficiency. This doesn’t imply a lot for the common gamer, but it surely’s notable as a result of when Nvidia launched its RTX 3080, it claimed that it might ship simply 30 TFLOPs of shader efficiency.
There’s little question that Nvidia may have put its greatest foot ahead with the temporary sport demonstrations it confirmed at GTC, and with no body charge comparisons between GPUs, it’s not but clear simply how highly effective the brand new card is. However it’s going to be very highly effective and units the tone for what next-generation graphics playing cards can do.
Energy draw
There have been heaps of rumors surrounding the RTX 4090 throughout its growth, particularly about how a lot energy it will require and the way a lot warmth it will kick out. It seems that the rumors have been a bit overblown, although the RTX 4090 continues to be a demanding card.
Nvidia recommends an 850W energy provide at a minimal for anybody operating this graphics card, however the 450W energy draw is not more than was already pulled by the RTX 3090 Ti, so it’s not an unlimited improve over the earlier era.
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