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

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

Richard Leadbetter avatar
Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry
Published on
33 comments

I've been in the fortunate position of having had access to the GeForce RTX 4090 for a few weeks now, allowing me to actually play some games with the card in addition to running all of the benchmarks you've seen on these pages. It's an important point to make because it's very easy to get fixated on percentage point differentials when actual gaming habits throw up some very different impressions. This is going to sound highly subjective and perhaps unbelievable to a certain extent, but the way I see it, for my use-case scenario at least - RTX 4090 'solves graphics' for practically all current generation games.

At native 4K resolution, essentially every non-ray traced game runs at 100 frames per second or higher. Some exceed 144fps as a matter of course, meaning that they'll 'max out' a 144Hz ultra HD display... and if they don't, a touch of DLSS quality mode gets you where you need to be. Personally, my PC gaming is based around a 4K 120Hz LG OLED CX screen, where I can game as I want, ramp everything up to the max and don't really need to worry about settings any more. It's a curious sensation. Even where the rasterisation gains gen-on-gen are notably 'weaker' according to the benchmarks, there's still enough extra power to fit my gaming to my display.

There's a flip-side to this, however, which is to say that use cases outside of high refresh rate 4K gaming are perhaps questionable. With the current generation of games, so much GPU power is available that there's a surfeit of performance for 1440p gaming - and on lower resolutions, there's very little point using an RTX 4090 whatsoever. Hitting those very high frame-rates on those super-popular 1440p high refresh rate screens also becomes a matter not just for the GPU (where I would suggest the problem is solved) but also for the CPU, which is often a bottleneck to getting the most out of the 4090. At least there's the potential for DLSS 3 frame generation to offer some kind of solution to this problem.

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In fact, there's so much raw graphics power here that sometimes you need to dig really deep to come up with scenarios where that power can tangibly pay off, outside of gaming on a high refresh rate 4K screen. As I am one of the few who do actually have an 8K display (which, resolution-wise, is actually the equivalent of four 4K displays), I did spend some time with the RTX 4090 there. It actually works surprisingly well at native resolution on a bunch of titles - remarkable when we're dealing with 33.2 million pixels per frame. Ray-traced titles also become viable with DLSS too. I could run Marvel's Spider-Man maxed at 8K 60fps using DLSS quality mode. These crazy use cases are far beyond the mainstream, of course, but the fact is that we are dealing with a massively expensive product aimed at users who likely do game with best-of-the-best kit.

What we're waiting for is a new generation of titles to take into this power - and they may well be en route. Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive update is essentially running the entire model with path-tracing, an astonishing endeavour that we can't wait to test out. RTX Remix is bringing path-tracing to older titles too, revolutionising the way they look - and we'll be looking more closely at Portal RTX as soon as we can. It seems that this is Nvidia's vision for the future of PC gaming, using a combination of machine learning upscaling (in both spatial and temporal dimensions) to deliver these extremely taxing visuals at playable performance levels. I do wonder whether the end-game is to see triple-A moving to fully RT renderers in combination with rasterisation or hybrid RT renderers for less capable PC hardware and for the consoles. Or, that we'll seem some deeper RT integration in the engine of choice - Unreal Engine 5 - which already has path tracing support.

So that's the RTX 4090 then. The new 'GPU king' is essentially a fantasy product made real, and for me it is achieving something that prior Titans and even RTX 3090 failed to achieve - we've finally 'beaten' 4K, we've 'mastered' current ray tracing titles and even settings selections don't seem to be much of an issue any more, especially with DLSS in the mix. UE5 and path-traced gaming may see the RTX 4090 really put through its paces, but the sheer overhead here... on the one hand it's quite astonishing, but on the other it reminds me that 4K 120Hz displays aren't exactly the norm. The new hardware may well be incredibly powerful, but I still feel RTX 3080 is fantastic 4K product, while the rest of the RTX 3000 line remains an excellent buy for today's games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. This may well have implications for the less performant RTX 4080 products to come - the question there being whether the Ampere products win out in terms of price vs performance, and the extent to which DLSS 3 may shift the equation. We'll find out soon enough, but for now at least, if you have the money to spare and if you're using a high-end display, the GeForce RTX 4090 is a remarkable achievement.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 analysis

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