MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Review: Ada Chills Out

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from UL. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading. Time Spy is designed to test the DX12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the UL Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

UL 3DMark Time Spy DX12 Benchmarks

In our first graphics / rendering benchmark, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X takes the lead once again, besting the Founder's Edition by a couple of percentage points and extending the lead over the previous-gen GPUs.

UL 3DMark Port Royal Ray Tracing Benchmarks

Port Royal was released as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable support for the feature.

The same performance trend we've seen to this point played out again in the ray tracing-enabled Port Royal benchmark. The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X takes the overall lead, outrunning the RTX 4090 Founder's Edition by a couple of percentage points.

DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) Feature Test

We also tested the cards with UL's DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test. This test is laser-focused on path-tracing performance, and uses few of the card's other resources.
When running a pure ray tracing test, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X maintains its slight lead over the RTX 4090 FE, and crushing everything else by a wide margin.

Crytek Neon Noir Benchmarks

Can you guess where there MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X finished in the Neon Noir benchmark? Yup -- back in the pole position, just slightly ahead of the Founder's Edition card at both resolutions.

VR Benchmarks: VR Mark & Unigine Superposition

Superposition is the latest benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in too. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some excellent visuals. We ran Superposition's VR Future benchmark to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition VR Future Test

Superposition's VR Future benchmark will only report a maximum "score" of 10,000, hence the identical results for the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X and NVIDIA's FE. Looking at the actual framerates, however, reveals another slight lead for the MSI card.

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


VRMark reports the same thing as every other test we've shown up to this point. The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X finishes slightly ahead of NVIDIA's Founder's Edition, but well out in front of any previous-gen GPU.