Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review: a new level in graphics power

Blitzes the games of today, built for the titles of tomorrow.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 12 Oct 2022

Ray tracing analysis continues here on page six of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review. With Hitman 3, we're seeing how Io Interactive pushed hard on RT features for an already impressive-looking game. Performance took a tumble, but now we have the horsepower to deliver fast frame-rates here. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition? The first triple-A title built only for systems with hardware accelerated ray tracing support. Finally, Marvel's Spider-Man actually has RT features that run very well on GPUs from all vendors, so the question there is: are we going to hit CPU limits again?

To reiterate how our benchmarking system presents, what you see changes according to the device you're viewing this. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is a bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Hitman 3

A straight doubling of performance gen-on-gen here, comparing RTX 4090 to RTX 3090, with a nigh-on 77 percentage point increase up against the RTX 3090 Ti. I think the thing to remember here is that just because there is a new GPU in town, it's not as if those older cards become any slower - they are both still excessively good products - just somewhat overpriced at this point. It's another one of those titles that emphasises just how far AMD needs to progress with RDNA 3 to remain competitive. I'm not particularly concerned with RDNA 3 raster performance - RDNA 2 was great there - but even if RDNA 3 is twice as fast, it's likely to hit some of the same CPU limitations as RTX 4090.

Hitman 3, Ultra RT, DX12, TAA

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Architected by 4A Games to run well on the current generation consoles - while still relying heavily on RT hardware - the company held true to its PC roots by offering a bunch of upgrades for PC users. RT fidelity increases substantially (and some might say that the ultra RT setting is overkill) while the addition of RT reflections was also welcome. Even so, here we start to see something approaching the kind of performance uplifts we saw in rasterisation benchmarks - a good 77 percentage point bump over RTX 3090, dropping back to circa 58 percent up against RTX 3090 Ti. We're still talking about a 114fps average in the Taiga stage, mind you, so this benchmark is no walk in the park for the cards tested.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Ultra, DX12, TAA

Marvel's Spider-Man

We tried hard to find a GPU benchmark that's actually meaningful for Marvel's Spider-Man. The issue is that while developer Nixxes did indeed push ray tracing features hard - significantly beyond the PS5 version's fidelity mode - the fact is that introducing RT sets a rather high CPU overhead. I've attempted to mitigate that by benchmarking FEAST HQ, which seems to be abnormally heavy on graphics instead. This puts the gen-on-gen gains back on track: an 88 percentage point increase up against RTX 3090, and a still creditable 74 percent boost against the RTX 3090 Ti. The circa 100fps at native 4K here is indicative of the kind of 4K performance you get from an RTX 4090 matched with a Core i9 12900K - and you'll need the CPU-agnostic DLSS 3 to go beyond that. More on this on page eight!