Intro
The $1599 RTX 4090 Performance of 45 Games, VR, SPEC, Pro Apps, Workstation & GPGPU
BTR recently received a RTX 4090 Founders Edition (FE) from Nvidia and we have been testing it for the past ten days by using 45 pancake and VR games plus GPGPU benchmarks. In addition, although the RTX 4090 is not a workstation card, we have added workstation SPEC benches and selected popular creative and synthetic apps. Although this new flagship Ada Lovelace card arrives with multiple new features including DLSS 3, this review will focus on testing raw performance, not upscaling.
The RTX 4090 is touted as a beast in every way by Nvidia as the fastest video card for gaming with up to 4X the performance of the Ampere flagship or up to 2X the performance without using DLSS 3. The RTX 4090 boasts 83 Shader-TFLOPS, 191 RT-TFLOPS, and 1.3 Tensor petaFLOPS. It achieves over 1 TB/s memory bandwidth using 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. Its 72 MB L2 cache offers a 12X improvement over the RTX 3090 Ti.
We will focus on RTX 4090 raw performance as well as consider whether the new RTX 4090 Founders Edition at $1599 delivers a good value as a compelling upgrade from the RTX 3090 which launched at $1499 two years ago. We will also compare performance with the RX 6900 XT. In addition to gaming, VR, and SPECworkstation3 GPU results, we have added creative results using Geekbench, the Blender 3.3.0 benchmark, and complete Sandra 2020 and AIDA64 GPGPU benchmark results plus some pro applications including Blender rendering and OTOY OctaneRender.
We benchmark using Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 at 2560×1440 and at 3840×2160 using Intel’s Core i9-12900K and 32GB of T-FORCE DELTA RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS ROG Maximus Apex motherboard. All games and benchmarks are the latest versions, and we use the latest GeForce Game Ready press drivers for games and for testing pro apps, and Adrenalin 22.10.1 for the RX 6900 XT benching.
Let’s first take a quick look at the RTX 4090 Founders Edition before we go to the test configuration
Perfect review. Waiting for the G2 benchmarks and 3080/6900xt comparison. God bless.
can you also run OpenVR Benchmark? That would be interesting to see.
Yes.
Thank-you all for commenting. Our follow up will use the G2 and VP2 and it may answer if the CPU is a bottleneck. Later (in the following months) we plan to retest using multiple CPUs (including i7-8700K & i9-10900K).
Looking forward to that, would kindly request you add MSFS and DCS to the list of games if that is possible.
Thanks for VR benchmarks, in the VR testing was your CPU bottleneck and we have more VR benchmarks HP Reverb and maybe if CPU bottleneck test.
I would be useful to have benchmarks with high end headsets like this one https://www.xtal.pro/product/xtal-3-mr
Thank you for the VR benchmarks! Really think this is the card for my Varjo Aero. I’m so spoiled, but gratefull 😉
DCS?
Appreciate the VR benchmarking, would love to see a comparison against the 6900xt or 6800xt included too for the VR testing.
Would be great to have the OpenVR Benchmark included using 90 Hz and Index SteamVR res 100%, thanks – this way all can easily compare own results.
Thanks for the great works as always 🙂
I would appreciate very much if you can do a vr performance test from star wars squadrons.
Great job with providing the only quality VR benchmarks around, this card really needs them since it’s one of the few gaming use cases where it makes sense to get one. Would love to see you include some MS Flight Simulator 2020 VR benchmarks also. I think there’s many in that community waiting to get some numbers.
Thank-you for your comments! I am working on a benchmark for MS/FS 2020 for next week’s follow-up review using the VP2/G2. I am not sure I can get to SW: Squadrons, however. It’s extra challenging and very time consuming to properly create high quality flight sim VR benches.
Thank you for doing the VR community a big favor do you have a YouTube channel?
Not really. BTR is text based and just uses Yt for occasional videos to support the reviews. You’re welcome. Expect a 4090/3090/6900xt follow-up next week using the G2/VP2 with more VR games.
Please test chess engines as well.
Wouldn’t a better comparison from AMD be the 6950 XT? Considering that’s their equivalent to the 3090
BTR doesn’t have access to a 6950 XT. Actually as AMD’s top card, the 6950 XT should be tested against the 3090 Ti (that we dont have either).
Hi I just wanted to say a sincere thanks for this amazing set of benchmarks which covers a wide range of games and really showcases how insanely fast this 4090 is, a true next-gen upgrade for anything playing at 4k+. Someone on Reddit mentioned you were going to add Skyrim/SkyrimVR results and if you do have the time to do that it would be great if you could use a Wabbajack modlist known for demanding visuals that really tests modern GPU’s. For Skyrim that would be something like The Phoenix Flavour or Licentia and for SkyrimVR that would be something like FUS or Tahrovin. If you don’t get time to do that then thanks again for all the time you spent creating these benchmarks, really great stuff. 🙂