 Nvidia's top of the line, RTX 3090. No, no, there's no time for that. We've got to talk about this thing now. If you haven't watched our RTX 3080 review, here's the background you need. RTX 3000, also known as Ampere, is what Nvidia is calling the biggest generational leap in performance in the company's history. Now, if you go back far enough, I'm a press X here, but he's also not joking. These cards, unlike the Turing-based RTX 2000 series, are smokin' fast right out of the gate with our RTX 3080 reaching speeds in the neighborhood of 75 to 100% faster than its predecessor, depending on the task. That, combined with Nvidia's super impressive DLSS 2.0 upscaling technology means that 4K gaming went from someday to today, right now. But wait, there's even more, like this message from our sponsor, Team Group. Team Group's extreme ARGB DDR4 gaming memory features clock speeds up to 4,000 megahertz and a stunning mirror design with RGB. Check it out on their launch event showing off their three brands and you can win a $3,000 PC at the link below. But the 3080 is last week's news. In my hands right now is what Jensen, CEO of Nvidia, lovingly referred to as the BFGPU. And spoiler alert, he's right. This is an RTX Titan for scale. Heck, here's an ROG Strix OC for scale. This thing is easily the largest, not to mention heaviest, conventional graphics card that I have ever seen, which means that anyone who buys one needs to also make some additional investments. First up, you're gonna need a case with a solid GPU mount and enough clearance. Being both taller and thicker than previous flagships, it simply won't fit in most small form factor cases. That is, unless you hot rod them. Second, you'll need a fat power supply. Rated at 350 watts of power consumption and with Nvidia's new 12-pin connector, the 3090 could easily push your previous unit to its limits. Last but not least, you're gonna need the fastest gaming CPU in the world because quite frankly, with anything else, you are going to be leaving performance on the table, which is something you don't wanna do when you're paying $1,500 US dollars for a graphics card. Yes, my friends, compared to the RTX 3080, the world's first 8K gaming GPU gets you more than double, not to mention faster video memory, 20% more CUDA, Tensor, and RT cores, and even NVLink support via a new connector that was presumably shrunk to minimize wasted space on the physically cut down PCB that makes Nvidia's new flow through cooler possible. But wait, double the video memory? Why? Well, aside from giving it much better compute capabilities and more importantly, the ability to render much more complex 3D scenes in software like Blender, as it turns out, gaming at 8K also genuinely demands this much video memory. I mean, think about it. 8K is 33 megapixels at 32 bits per pixel. That means to display just a single frame, 128 megabytes of video memory is needed, which doesn't sound so bad, but add in textures models, screen space effects, and of course, RTX real-time ray tracing. I mean, come on. And you've got yourself many times that, ideally 60 times per second or more. Wolfenstein Youngblood clocked in at over 11 gigs of memory usage at 8K. Sounds fun, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to performance, doesn't it? So by request, we built up a Core i9 10900K test bench to minimize our CPU bottlenecks and dug out our RTX 3080 along with a 2080 Ti and Titan RTX for comparison. Starting off with Minecraft RTX, we're seeing about a 22% average frame rate improvement over the RTX 3080 and a whopping 51 to 60% over the Titan RTX, both with DLSS on and off. Not bad. Wolfenstein Youngblood, meanwhile, gives us a much more modest performance improvement over the 3080 at around 15%, but while still pulling off a respectable 50% improvement over the Titan RTX, a card that costs $1,000 more. So there you have it, guys. Buy yourself an RTX 3090 and a water bottle with all that money you saved, am I right? LTTstore.com. CSGO and Microsoft Flight Simulator tell a very similar story in 4K, but interestingly, the gap narrows significantly for Flight Simulator at 1440p because of CPU bottlenecks. That's right, despite the OPCPU and ultra graphic settings. Finally, the Parallel N64 emulator, which does most of the graphics and sound emulation on the GPU rather than the CPU and recently added upscaling support, shows us that the extra oomph brings us up to 99th percentile frame times near 60 FPS. That eight times upscale, by the way, works out to more pixels than 5K emulated. But then there's the elephant in the room, 8K gaming. As Tom's Hardware reported, Nvidia's demos only showed 8K AAA gaming with DLSS 2.0 in what they're calling ultra performance mode. Now before, DLSS 2.0 offered performance and quality scaling options, with performance rendering at 1080p, like DLSS 1.0, and quality rendering at 1440p before upscaling, usually to 4K. Now ultra performance still uses 1440p, but instead of performing a reasonable scaling jump up to 4K, it's trying to take that data and go all the way up to 8K. I mean, that's a lot of guesses to make in terms of, hmm, what are those smeary pixels? So does it look any good? Well, on a 4K display, there's little point in using it since the only real effect is similar to anti-aliasing, which can be had with less performance penalty in other ways. But if you are one of the privileged few with an 8K display today, here are some shots of what you can expect to see from 4K native versus 8K DLSS ultra performance versus 8K native. You can see clearly that 8K DLSS ultra performance delivers significantly more detail than 4K does, even if it isn't quite up to 8K native standards. I mean, check out the text and distant details in this shot, for example. 8K DLSS ends up much closer to 8K native here, even if it's still not perfect. And the same deal with these grates on the floor in this shot. They're almost completely wiped out in 4K, but DLSS restores that. Now, performance is roughly 25% less than 4K, but that still puts us above the magic 60 FPS mark on average, which is pretty sweet if you shelled out for one of those new 8K TVs with HDMI 2.1. Even better is that not every game, even AAA games necessarily needs to use DLSS. We ran Doom Eternal at native 8K with very high detail settings for what was honestly the most mind-bending experience I've had with this GPU so far. And we barely saw dips below 60 FPS. Also impressive during that session with the 88 inch TV was HDR gameplay recording with shadow play. Now we had wanted to include a big section about performance and image quality, but the story is sort of already in the footage that you're looking at. It just worked. The performance hit was reasonable and it looks as good as you could expect given the 100 megabit per second bit rate at such a massive resolution. Our entire 8K gaming experience video yesterday was shot with it running in the background without any hiccups whatsoever. Great job. Productivity though is where the RTX 3090 both gets to stretch its legs and also get a little bit dicey. Going up against the Titan and Blender, we saw anywhere from a 50% improvement with the CPU optimized Gooseberry render all the way up past 100% more performance in the Pavilion Barcelona Optics render. Yes, my friends, Gooseberry, a benchmark designed for CPUs can run on all of these cards thanks to their ridiculous amounts of VRAM. Other rendering benchmarks like V-Ray, Redshift, and Octanebench all provide similar numbers across the board with the RTX 3090 hovering around the 15 to 20% mark over the 3080 and 50 to 80% over the Titan. Then there's SpecView Perf where we can see that the RTX 3090 is... Sorry, wait, what? No, no, go back to that. Katia ran over 40% faster on the Titan? How does that make sense? Okay, so as it turns out, this card, while it has more raw hutpa than the Titan RTX and was introduced as if it were a Titan-ish, it isn't a Titan. When we spoke to Nvidia, they explained that there are driver optimizations for the Titan that have not been enabled for the RTX 3090 and presumably won't. And they confirmed that these results are 100% expected behavior, which kind of sucks because if this thing is mostly just a giant overgrown 3080 Ti at $1,500, what's the Ampere Titan gonna cost? Three grand? Anyway, back to SpecView Perf. We did get several wins for both the RTX 3090 and the Titan RTX depending on the workload, with Siemens NX not even being in the same area code, let alone ballpark. That's kind of rough for professionals who are looking to juice up their workstation for CAD work by day and gaming at 8K by night. Which do they choose? And there's more bad news. Remember that bit about needing a new power supply? Well, our test bench sure did. Even a high quality 850 watt couldn't keep up with our RTX 3090 routinely breaking 375 watts with Nvidia's PCAP power meter connected throughout our testing with a peak power draw of over 450 watts. The Titan RTX meanwhile, barely broke 300 watts the whole time. Thankfully, the cooler as with the RTX 3080 was well up to the task and it didn't even break a sweat through SpecView Perf with thermals never pushing past 70 degrees. Also core clocks were ridiculously stable at around two gigahertz under load. So I guess all that weight and metal is doing its job and then some. Nvidia was clearly really concerned with thermals this time around and they just did a great job. There's no other way of putting it. And hopefully that means some overclocking headroom as well. Early reports on the RTX 3080 seemed to suggest that the GDDR6X memory is pretty easily bumped up. But we've also seen reports that Nvidia went for lower speed RAM due to thermal limitations. So as always stress test your over clocks with a prolonged load before considering them tournament ready. And speaking of overclocking, we have a video coming where we look at the differences between aftermarket GPUs. So make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it. For now, these results leave me, I mean, there's no real word for it other than conflicted about the RTX 3090. On the one hand, it's a beast of a graphics card. But on the other hand, it's clear that Nvidia is holding it back so they don't eat into their Titan or Quadro lineups. Kind of like how Intel runs things with Xeon. It runs really cool with a fan that's not nearly as loud as the RTX 2000 series, but it guzzles power. And I can't help feeling like a doofus for buying it for a workstation or CAD use, knowing that there could be a Titan coming down the line. That puts the 3090 squarely in prosumer slash enthusiast territory. So like super high end gamers, content creators, and especially 3D modelers are gonna love it, which isn't a bad thing, it's just a niche thing. And I can't help but feel that Nvidia could have done more to make the 3090 shine. Do you think that's fair? Anthony? Do you think that's fair? Yeah. How about you Jensen? I know you watch our videos, and I also know that you don't like it when you think I'm not being fair, which is kind of funny to me because I get to sit here imagining a man who casually buys $40 billion companies and changes computing as we know it, who still gets butt hurt when some nobody YouTuber doesn't like his gaming widget enough. But on the other hand, you know what Jensen? I actually really liked that about you. It's that kind of passion that makes Nvidia so great. So I've resolved to keep making you mad, because evidently when you got mad that I didn't like your RTX 2080 Ti, we got the 3080. So I might go even harder on you guys just to see how far you can push PC gaming. No, I'm just kidding Jensen, sort of. Since I have your attention, please unlock the Titan driver paths and SRIOV, at least for the RTX 3090. This is a niche enthusiast card, and it should really enjoy niche enthusiast features. Don't you think? 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Or if you're a new OnePassword user, head to the link below to also receive $5 when signing up. Good stuff. So thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for something else to watch, go check out our review of the RTX 3080, where we happen to use a Ryzen bench instead of an Intel bench. Does it perform better with PCIe Gen 4? I'll see you over there.