Nvidia’s $1,599 GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card sports a luxury price tag, but you get a truly luxurious gaming experience in return. Want face-melting frame rates? The last-generation RTX 3090 was a speed demon, but the GeForce RTX 4090—thanks to Nvidia’s new “Ada Lovelace” architecture—screams through traditional games up to 83 percent faster. Nvidia’s 40-series flagship chews through futuristic ray-traced games too, propelled by more-advanced 3rd-gen RT cores and a radical new Frame Generation DLSS 3 feature that doubles (or more) frame rates yet again with a heaping helping of AI.
It’s not just about games, though. Creators will love the 24GB of blazing-fast GDDR6X memory when it comes to pixel-packed video renders, and Nvidia’s inclusion of not one, but two AV1 video encoders means the RTX 4090 is suitably equipped to handle the future of streaming.
No matter what you want to accomplish, the monstrous GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition can handle it without breaking a sweat—though your wallet and power supply might, as all this extra performance doesn’t come free. Let’s dig in.
SPECS, FEATURES, AND PRICE
This first GPU of a new generation provides our first glimpse at Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace architecture, running on a custom TSMC 4N (read: fancy 5nm) process. It’s a ferocious jump. Before we start, here’s a high-level look at how the RTX 4090’s specifications compare to prior-gen GeForce flagships (which amusingly all sport different tier classifications).
The leap from Samsung’s 8N process to TSMC’s much more advanced 4N process can’t be understated. Last-generation’s full-fat RTX 3090 Ti packed 10,752 CUDA graphics cores and 28.3 billion transistors into a massive 628.4mm die. The new RTX 4090 ups that to a ludicrous 16,384 CUDA cores and 76.3 billion transistors on a smaller die. Thanks, TSMC!
But Nvidia worked its magic, too. While the bones of the Ada Lovelace architecture don’t stray that wildly from last-gen’s Ampere design—though there’s a lot more of everything—Nvidia made some key tweaks to push performance even further. One example is a new Shader Execution Reordering function, which groups and schedules similar shading work on the fly. It boosts performance in games running traditionally rasterized graphics, sure, but it accelerates ray tracing even more.
Enhancing ray-tracing performance was clearly a focus for Nvidia with the RTX 4090. The Ada Lovelace architecture upgrades to third-generation RT cores and fourth-gen tensor AI cores, all faster and more efficient than before. They’re augmented by a beefed-up Optical Flow Accelerator that, in tandem with the tensor cores, unlocks DLSS 3 and its new Frame Generation feature.
Nvidia’s DLSS 2 already stood strong as the gold standard for image upscaling, but DLSS increase performance—even in CPU bound games, thanks to the way it works.
