“This is a monster”

Nvidia’s new flagship impresses, even if the price is outrageous and their marketing was too hard.

“A quantum leap for gamers,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when he presented his new video cards in September.

The flagship Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is the first product in the 4000 series to hit the market. The display card is built on the new Ada Lovelace architecture, which will replace the Ampere architecture in the coming years.

The performance was supposed to be anywhere from two to four times as high as the previous generation.

Nvidia has spread the word quite thickly during the marketing before the launch, but the new 4000 series is in any case a victory for those with the cash who want powerful graphics performance.

“The prices of video cards will rise”.

High inflation, difficult conditions for production, tougher competition from AMD and consumers’ expectations of big leaps in gaming performance, mean that Nvidia thins our wallets to help their own margins and ensure increasing frame rates.

“They will probably come out of it just fine. People still buy the product”.

RTX 4090 costs less than RTX 3090 Ti, but is terribly expensive. Nevertheless, it is the price level of the RTX 4080, RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 that people will be most annoyed by, not this.

Few people need something as powerful as the RTX 4090.

Game performance:

Simply put; The RTX 4090 is a monster. It crushes everything else on the market in 4K and above, and takes a clear lead in 1440p.

The graphic card also depicts how far the producers have come in recent years. Today, the best cards are of no use for 1920×1080 gaming, other than in the most demanding e-sports games, where you would like to have a 360 hz or (in each case) 480 hz screen.

The processors are not powerful enough to keep up anymore.

In any case, mid-range video cards are more than enough for 1080p, and the RTX 4090 is meaningless if you are not going to play in higher resolutions or with ray tracing.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are the only games I’ve tested in which the RTX 4090 is clearly better than the competition in 1080p without ray tracing. It is only in 1440p that more of the workload is moved to the video card, and the RTX 4090 starts to shine.

The Benchtest:

Compared to the AMD RX 6950 XT, the RTX 4090 is on average 26 percent faster in 1440p and 40 percent faster in 4K.

Compared to the RTX 3090, the RTX 4090 is 27 percent faster in 1440p and 53 percent faster in 4K. These measurements are without ray tracing and DLSS. The latter changes the calculation in the RTX 4090’s favor by a good margin.

The cut in frame rate again shows that you don’t need a video card as powerful as the RTX 4090, unless you absolutely have to play at an ultra level and have the best possible performance. This is for those who are particularly interested.

At the same time, new games will challenge the video card further. Cyberpunk 2077 is the most demanding game on our test list, where the RTX 4090 manages an average of 77 FPS in 4K.

In the course of the next year, there will definitely be something that the RTX 4090 cannot drive above the magical 60 limit. That’s just the way it is.

In any case, it will be another generation before we have an XX90 card that captures everything in 4K, no matter what. And yet another generation for the same with ray tracing.

Is ray tracing finally worth using?

Cyberpunk 2077 has, in my opinion, the best implementation of ray tracing ever. The RTX 4090 crushes its predecessor in the game.

In 1440p, the RTX 4090 increases the frame rate by an average of 80 percent in our various test games against the RTX 3090, and in 4K the figure is 90 percent.

In Cyberpunk 2077, performance increases by 110 percent. That’s a lot.

If we switch off ultra on the overall settings, and ray tracing to a more reasonable level, the RTX 4090 handles ray tracing in both 6K and 8K.