NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Review: Ada Dominates PC Graphics

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 benchmark, the GeForce RTX 4090 continues to dominate, crushing all of the other GPUs we tested by a wide margin and nearly doubling the performance of the popular GeForce RTX 3080.

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 Port Royal Ray hybrid ray tracing test also has the GeForce RTX 4090 pulling well ahead of every other high-end GPU on the market. Here, the GeForce RTX 4090 nearly doubles the performance of the original RTX 3090 and more than doubles the performance of every card below that.

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 examined solely under the lens of DXR ray-tracing, the GeForce RTX 4090 looks even more impressive. In this test, NVIDIA's newest flagship more than doubles the performance of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and makes everything else look paltry by comparison.

Crytek Neon Noir Benchmarks

Once again the GeForce RTX 4090 puts up an absolutely dominant performance. With Crytek's proprietary Ray Tracing-enabled test, the GeForce RTX 4090 continues to crush the competition, with the largest delta evident at 4K resolution.

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

Superposition's VR Future benchmark gets completely maxed out by the GeForce RTX 4090. 10,000 is the top score possible in this benchmark, which makes the overall score seem moderately better than the RTX 3090 Ti. But looking at the individual frame rates and frame times, the GeForce RTX 4090 continues to offer nearly double the performance of some of today's highest-end graphics cards.

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 tells essentially the same story as Unigine's VR test. Here, the GeForce RTX 4090 doubles the performance of the Radeon RX 6900 XT and everything below it, and crushes even the mighty GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.