NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Review: Ada Dominates PC Graphics

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

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Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon 22.9.1 NVIDIA Drivers v521.90

Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 Forza Horizon 5 F1 2022 / F1 2021 A Plague Tale: Requiem Guardians Of The Galaxy Fortnite Microsoft Flight Simulator

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With its 24GB of RAM and massive compute resources, the GeForce RTX 4090 is well suited to high-end gaming and content creation workloads. As such, we wanted to run some compute and rendering tests to see how the card stack up with these workloads, relative to the competition. Don't sweat it though, we'll get to a bunch of game tests, including a slew with DLSS 3 frame generation soon enough...

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

This rendering test also had the new GeForce RTX 4090 dominating the competition. The AD102's immense compute resources and memory bandwidth once again allow it to outrun the Radeon RX 6900 XT by over 2X, and it leaves the RTX 3090 Ti in the dust as well.

Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...

Blender can make use of the GeForce RTX 4090's (and RTX 3090 Ti's) RT cores using the NVIDIA OptiX framework, which give NVIDIA's architectures a huge boost here. That said, the GeForce RTX 4090's performance here is simply impressive to say the least. The GeForce RTX 4090 outperforms the RTX 3090 Ti by huge margins and makes the Radeon RX 6900 XT look like an entry level GPU.

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results

The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.


Once again we see the GeForce RTX 4090 pulling well ahead of the RTX 3090 Ti and dominating the Radeon RX 6900 XT, at least with the more compressed 12:1 8K video. In the more taxing 3:1 8K configuration, all of the high-end cards finish in the same ballpark, though the GeForce RTX 4090 technically pulls off another win.