Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

On this page, we're opting for Far Cry 5, Death Stranding and Hitman 2 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey is normally included here but some testing abormalities mean that it has been shelved for this particular review.

As we mentioned before, we're using our 2020-era rig for these tests. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on an ultra-premium Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with an Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4 RAM at 3600MHz CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by a 1000W Corsair RM1000x PSU.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding exhibits the smallest performance delta we've yet seen, at just two percent at 4K. That's surprisingly small, and suggest we may be approaching a CPU limit! By comparison, the RX 6900 XT is 95 percent of the speed of the RTX 3090 Ti, which is again the closest result we've recorded.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is another game that's CPU-limited at lower resolutions, but stretch it to 4K and the hierarchy we expect appears. Still, it's just a three percent advantage for the RTX 3090 Ti over the standard 3090 here, with a seven percent delta between the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6900 XT. At lower resolutions, basically any graphics card from the last few years is more than sufficient to make good use of a 144Hz monitor.

Hitman 2

Our quartet of slightly-CPU-limited games continues with Hitman 2. Again, 4K is the only real difference-maker here, with an 8.5 percent advantage for the chocolate-flavoured Ti over the vanilla 3090. That translates into a 15 percent advantage for the 3090 Ti over the fastest AMD card we've tested, with the important proviso that the RX 6950 XT hasn't been made available to our labs just yet.

So it's much less impressive stuff from our second group of games - but we still have two more titles then our RT benchmarks to go before we conclude. Let's keep it going.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti analysis

• Introduction and hardware analysis
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2 - Game Benchmarks Part 2 [This Page]
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti - the Digital Foundry verdict