MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Review: Ada Chills Out
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker launched at the end of last year, and as usual, Square-Enix updated its free character creator and benchmark tool. The free utility checks in at approximately a 2.21GB download. It will test your PC's ability to run the game at various settings, and presents a final result with an overall rating upon its conclusion. We tested Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker at 1440p and in 4K UHD, with maximum image quality settings.
Final Fantasy Endwalker
This benchmark is mostly CPU bound, and the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X ends up just behind the Founder's Edition at the lower resolution. With the resolution cranked up to 4K though, the tables turn, and the MSI card leads once again, albeit with a slightly lower minimum framerate.
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Details @ 4K
The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X takes the overall lead at both resolutions in Assassin's Creed Valhalla as well, with nearly double the average framerates of the GeForce RTX 3080.
We saw more of the same in Forza Horizon 5. The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X takes the top spot, smoking all of the previous-gen GPUs by wide margins.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmarks
Final Fantasy Endwalker
This benchmark is mostly CPU bound, and the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X ends up just behind the Founder's Edition at the lower resolution. With the resolution cranked up to 4K though, the tables turn, and the MSI card leads once again, albeit with a slightly lower minimum framerate.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla Benchmarks
The open-world Assassin's Creed Valhalla is an action-adventure game in which the player controls Viking raider Eivor Varinsdottir as he and his compatriots battle Anglo-Saxons through various regions. The games uses the AnvilNext 2.0 engine, which requires DirectX 12...
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Details @ 4K
Forza Horizon 5 Benchmarks
Forza Horizon 5 is the latest edition of the popular racing game franchise. The game features much larger maps than its predecessors, with more detailed models, and higher graphics fidelity in general. Forza 5 leverages the proprietary ForzaTech engine and DirectX 12...
Forza Horizon 5
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Details @ 4K
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Details @ 4K
We saw more of the same in Forza Horizon 5. The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X takes the top spot, smoking all of the previous-gen GPUs by wide margins.
Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is an action-adventure game where you play as Star-Lord and lead the rest of the Guardians from mission to mission. The game’s minimum requirements call for a Radeon RX 570 or GeForce GTX 1060-class GPU, but it also supports some of the latest graphics technologies, including DXR and DLSS.
GeForce RTX 4090 Details @ 4K
When running at 1440p, without any Ray Tracing effects, Guardians is mostly CPU bound on the highest-end cards and the deltas separating them all are relatively small. With the resolution cranked up to 4K, however, the GeForce RTX 4090 cards are able to stretch their legs and jump out to much larger leads, with the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X taking the lead.
GeForce RTX 4090 Details @ 4K w/ RT
With ray tracing enabled in this game, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X continues to lead the pack, with significant performance improvements over the previous gen cards.
Far Cry 6 Benchmarks
Next up, we’ve got some benchmark scores from Far Cry 6, the latest installment in the storied franchise. Like its predecessors, Far Cry 6 is a fast-action shooter set in an open world environment with lush visuals and high graphics fidelity. The game is set on the fictional Caribbean island of Yara, ruled by dictator "El Presidente" Antón Castillo, famously played by actor Giancarlo Esposito. We tested all of the graphics cards here at multiple resolutions using Ultra Quality settings to see how they handled this AAA title.
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Details @ 4K
The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X technically trailed the Founder's Edition here, but by the smallest of margins. Versus the previous gen cards though, there's no contest.
GeForce RTX 4090 Details @ 4K w/ RT
F1 2021 & F1 2022 Benchmarks
F1 2022 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA technologies (like DLSS). We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray-tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what the graphics cards could do.
F1 2021 / F1 2022
In the newer, more taxing F1 2022, the same held true with the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X outrunning the RTX 4090 by a couple of percentage points, but dominating the previous-gen cards.
DLSS 3 And Latency Testing With The MSI Suprim Liquid X
We also tested F1 2022 and a couple of additional games -- namely A Plague Tale: Requiem and Fortnite -- with the various DLSS 3 modes available. Please note, all of these games were also tested with beta builds, updated to support DLSS 3 with resolution scaling and AI Frame Generation options.
DLSS resolution scaling in its various modes boosts F1 2022 performance significantly, with even the best "Quality" mode offering big performance boost over native. Image quality remains good in this game with all modes, save for Ultra Performance, which introduces some aliasing and specular shimmering is some sections. Ultra Performance mode is really targeted for 8K resolution on the GeForce RTX 4090, however. With AI Frame Generation also enabled, performance is cranked up another notch, with Balanced mode more than doubling the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X's performance at 4K.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is more CPU bound than F1 2022, so we saw much larger performance gains with AI Frame Generation enabled. In this game, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X clearly outruns the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with native rendering, though 1% low framerates don't jump significantly with DLSS using only resolution scaling. Enable AI Frame Generation, however, and the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X's effective performance improved quite a bit, both in terms of 1% low and average framerates.
We also snapped off a few screenshots in this game to try and illustrate how the various DLSS modes impacted image quality, and have them posted in our coverage of NVIDIA's Founder's Edition if you'd like to check them out.
Finally, we did some DLSS and Latency testing with Fortnite and A Plague Tale: Requiem. Please note while looking at these three charts above, that the scales are completely different between the Ampere-based RTX 3090 Ti and the Ada-based RTX 4090s. Framerates are off to to the right, and latency at the various modes are to the left. As you can see, the GeForce RTX 4090 cards once again clearly outrun the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with much better 1% low and average framerates. And the various DLSS modes only increase performance over native. Despite the additional processing going on with DLSS, the increased framerates also end up reducing overall latency. As we've seen in most of our previous tests, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X was not only the fastest card here, it offered better system latency as well.
