NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Unleashed – See Specs, Price, and Availability

NVIDIA just announced its latest next-generation, flagship GPU based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture – the GeForce RTX 4090. And oh boy, the RTX 4090 Founders Edition alone is one thick and chunky graphics card. It’s a 3-slot graphics card and most of the custom cards from AIB partners are 3-slot thick as well. The new RTX 4090 GPU features 3rd gen RT cores, 4th gen Tensor cores, and NVIDIA DLSS 3.0 exclusively. More on that later. Check out the rest of its features, specs, price, and availability below.

UPDATE: GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards are now available on Amazon.com here.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 – Up to 4X Faster Than RTX 3090 Ti, But…

According to NVIDIA, the GeForce RTX 4090 is the world’s fastest gaming GPU with astonishing power, acoustics, and temperature characteristics. It features 16384 NVIDIA Cuda cores, with 76 billion transistors; paired with 24GB GDDR6X memory running on a 384-bit memory interface. Aside from using the new Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 4090 is built with 3rd generation Ray Tracing Cores and 4th generation Tensor cores. We don’t know yet the exact number of these cores as NVIDIA hasn’t disclosed them yet.

For comparison, the RTX 3090 Ti has 10752 CUDA cores and the RTX 3090 has 10496. They also have the same 24GB GDDR6X 384-bit memory as the RTX 4090. But both RTX 30 cards are based on the previous generation Ampere architecture and the previous generation of Ray Tracing and Tensor cores.

The RTX 4090 also features DLSS 3 that can offer up to 4x faster compared to the last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2. Unfortunately, DLSS 3.0 is only available to the new RTX 40 series GPUs. No wonder these new GPUs can pull off up to 4x the performance since the previous RTX 30 series GPUs don’t support DLSS 3.0. It could also consistently deliver over 100 frames per second at 4K-resolution gaming.

When it comes to performance, NVIDIA says that the RTX 4090 is up to 2x faster in today’s games while maintaining the same 450W power consumption. Speaking of power, the RTX 4090 has a graphics card power draw of 450W and it requires at least an 850W PSU. It will also use the 12VHPWR 12+4pin connector that will be common on the latest ATX 3.0 PCIe 5.0 power supplies.

GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs New Features

• Streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 teraflops of shader power — 2x over the previous generation.
• Third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops — 2.8x over the previous generation.
• Fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops — 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.
• Shader Execution Reordering (SER) improves execution efficiency by rescheduling shading workloads on the fly to better utilize the GPU’s resources. As significant an innovation as out-of-order execution was for CPUs, SER improves ray-tracing performance by up to 3x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.
• Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, enabling the neural network to boost frame rates while maintaining image quality.
• Architectural improvements tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology results in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency.
• Dual NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC) cut export times by up to half and feature AV1 support. The NVENC AV1 encode is being adopted by OBS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Discord, and more.

GeForce RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti Performance

NVIDIA also teased some performance metrics. On the graph below, NVIDIA compared the RTX 4090 vs the RTX 3090 Ti using Microsoft Flight Simulator, Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, and Cyberpunk 2077. For the two game titles, the RTX 4090 is around 2x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti. Meanwhile, it’s more than 4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti. This is because the RTX 4090 has DLSS 3.0 and the RTX 3090 Ti is only limited to DLSS 2.0.

Aside from gaming benchmarks, NVIDIA also showed a 3D rendering and video editing benchmark comparison. The RTX 4090 performed faster than the RTX 3090 Ti significantly, cutting the rendering time in half.

Of course, these are cherry-picked and controlled benchmarks. We will have to wait for 3rd party testing and benchmarks to see the true performance of the RTX 4090. But so far, it does look promising. Although, it’s unfortunate that DLSS 3.0 will not be available on the older RTX 30 and RTX 20 series GPUs.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Price and Availability

The GeForce RTX 4090 will be available on Oct. 12, starting at $1,599. It will also be available as custom boards, including stock-clocked and factory-overclocked models, from top AIC providers such as ASUS, Colorful, Gainward, Galaxy, GIGABYTE, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac.

UPDATE: GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards are now available on Amazon.com here.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Specifications