NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 GRAPHICS CARD REVIEW

 NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 GRAPHICS CARD REVIEW

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 GRAPHICS CARD DETAILED REVIEW

NVIDIA RTX 40-series graphics cards are finally here. Powered by NVIDIA Ada 

architecture, successor to their Ampere architecture, boasts of much higher 

performance across the board. Be it ray-tracing, raster graphics or AI, the new 

NVIDIA RTX 40 cards are poised to completely shatter all benchmarks. Whether

 they do that, is something we’ll see. 

SPECIFICATIONS

NVIDIA is kicking off the launch with the high-end GPUs first and the RTX 4090 is

 leading the pack with a massive GPU at the heart of the graphics card. The AD102 

GPU is 608mm2 in size which is a little smaller than the GA102 Ampere GPU that

 powered the RTX 3090 Ti. Shifting from Samsung 8nm to the much more efficient 

TSMC N5 node has certainly helped reduce the size while squeezing in a lot more 

transistors. The 628mm2 GA102 has 28.3 billion transistors whereas the AD102 has

 76.3 billion transistors. Speaking of the process node, is it really 4nm or 5nm? 

Well, let’s remind everyone that the numbers no longer have any technical link to

 the process nodes. They’re simply marketing nomenclature. None of the transistors

 are actually 4nm or 5nm in size. As for the NVIDIA RTX 40-series cards, the GPUs

 are built on a tweaked version of the TSMC N5 node which is being termed as “4N”.

 The next TSMC node after N5 is actually N3 and that’s still some time away from 

entering mass production. 

Coming back to the GPU at hand. The AD102 has 16384 CUDA cores, 512 Texture

 Mapping Units, 176 Render Units, 512 Tensor Cores and 129 Ray Tracing cores 

spread across 128 Streaming Multiprocessors. These 3rd Gen RT cores offer up to 

2x ray tracing performance and the Tensor Cores, which are now 4th Gen, offer 2x

 the AI performance as previous cores. This means that the ray tracing performance 

is being augmented by an equally significant DLSS performance uptick which is 

driven by the AI cores in the GPU. Also, NVIDIA has added AV1 decoders in these 

new GPUs. This is a significant change since most hardware only featured AV1 

decode capabilities despite the open-source video encoding standard having been

 around for quite some time. 

BUILD

Despite the ridiculous number of transistors being packed into the AD102 GPU, the

 RTX 4090 has been designed for a TGP of 450 Watts. While keeping it the same as

 the previous gen RTX 3090 Ti is a commendable task, it still is a lot of power. And

 the size of the GPU reminds you of that fact. The RTX 4090 is a beast of a GPU 

measuring at 304mm x 137 mm x 61 mm. 

The look of the RTX 40-series graphics cards is very similar to the RTX 30-series 

cards. You’ve got the matte black body with a metallic ‘X’ pattern in the front with 

black heatsink fins making up most of the body. 

The rear continues to have a backplate with an inlay of the model name - 

“RTX 4090”. The ‘X’ in the centre extends to wrap around the body and forms the

 sides of the GPU. 

There are two fans on the RTX 4090, both of them arranged in the same push-pull 

configuration as the previous gen RTX flagship cards but with much more air flow.

 Apparently, they push about 80 cubic feet of air per minute which is enough to

 inflate 3.5 regulation basketballs every second when running at peak load. The 

fans are also a little larger and are fluid bearing fans instead of the ball bearing 

fans that the previous gen had.

The power connector follows the new ATX 3.0 PCIe Gen 5 standard with 12 pins for

 the power and ground lines and an additional 4 pins which can talk to the SMPS for

 better synergy. 

Lastly, the far-end of the GPU has a little metallic plate held in place with magnets

 which comes off to show two screw holes. These can be used to connect support 

rods since the card is very heavy. 

PERFORMANCE

We’ve only had a day with the card so we haven’t completed testing the unit 

completely. What you see below are the initial benchmark numbers that were run at

 1080p. We’re still running 1440p and 4k benchmarks. The review and the verdict 

will be updated over the course of the next two days as we finish testing our entire

 benchmark suite.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

Game @1080p	FPS
Assassin's Creed Valhalla	182
Battlefield V	213
Borderlands 3	95
CIV VI	311
Control	231
Cyberpunk 2077	135
Doom Eternal	483
F1 2022	295
HITMAN 3	131
Metro Exodus	240
Cyberpunk 2077	135
Cyberpunk 2077 RTX	81
Cyberpunk 2077 RTX + DLSS3

VERDICT

The RTX 4090 takes one massive leap in performance from all the 1080p

 benchmarks that we have run thus far. We're still reserving judgement regarding

 the 1440p and 4K gaming performance but from what we've seen thus far, it seems

 like the RTX 4090 will have a similarly impressive performance gap over the 

previous gen GPUs. 

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 GRAPHICS CARD KEY SPECS, PRICE AND

 LAUNCH DATE

Price:	₹155000
Release Date:	11 Oct 2022