 This is the world's fastest gaming GPU, as of yesterday. Today, Nvidia launches this, the GeForce RTX 4090, a massive improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. So why aren't I more excited? The fact that I could buy a cheap used car for what Nvidia is asking for this aside, there are some other problems that we need to talk about. Right after I tell you about our sponsor. Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM is a 360 degree solution that offers an intuitive UI, AI predictions, and a design studio to help get your sales done faster. Get 50% off with code ZCRM50 using the link down below. Two years ago, the GeForce RTX 3090 launched at an eye watering $1,500 US. And Nvidia's justification for this was that it was a Titan class GPU. Now, of course, we all know now that that was BS, as Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 Ti just six months ago in March of 2022 at $2,000, with a very modest spec bump for the price and still no Titan class floating point compute functionality. Both cards are available at around $1,000 or so today, thanks to the crash in GPU demand. And competition from AMD is actually coming in a little bit less than that. The RTX 4090, that launches at $1,600 US. What do you get for the price of three PS5 gaming consoles? It's not a Titan class GPU, and it has the same amount of VRAM as the previous gen RTX 3090. But that's where the similarities end. Not only is the memory as fast as what you'd find on an RTX 3090 Ti, you're getting over 50% more Cuda cores that are each clocked at over 35% higher. I mean, say what you want, but that alone would be a substantial upgrade for a mere 7% increase in MSRP, which is half the rate of inflation since 2020. What a steal is what I would say if it weren't for the fact that it's honestly, it's still the price of an entire mid-range gaming PC on its own. So what else does this bring to the table? Nvidia claims that each of their Cuda cores is beefed up compared to the outgoing Ampere architecture in almost all respects, with claimed performance improvements of up to two times what the 30 series could achieve. That's thanks in large part to nearly double the L1 cache and a substantial change in the core layout itself, and also to the use of TSMC's new N4 process that allows the total die area to be nearly 150 millimeters squared smaller than its predecessor. Of course, we need to test Nvidia's claims. So we cut the lamps to fire up our shiny new socket AM5 bench with a fresh install of Windows 11 22H1 and go to town with testing. Why 22H1? Apparently, 22H2 introduced some issues that Nvidia is not going to have ironed out by the time this video airs. But for now, let's turn our attention to the main event, games. And right out of the gate. OK, no, these numbers aren't right. Turns out stability issues with our bench messed up the settings and enabled Fidelity FX upscaling. Our bad. It's still really good, though. That's over 60 FPS most of the time in native 4K. We're also looking at minimum frame rates beyond 120 at 4K in Forza Horizon 5 compared to sub 90 on the 3090Ti. And it is incredibly stable. Assassin's Creed Valhalla's frame rate also shot up by about 50% on the 4090, enabling 4K 120 FPS gameplay without any compromises. Remember, this is just the rasterization performance, what we thought Nvidia was trying to hide from us by showing off their RT performance in the press materials. Far Cry 6, another Ubisoft title, doesn't seem quite the same improvement, however, at about 30% or so across the board. It's not bad. Like, not at all. But I'm just ruined after seeing those other results. Improvements continue to become more modest in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where we're likely starting to get CPU limited at 4K. I'll let that sink in for a moment. Maybe wash it down with a big swing from our chungus 64 ounce water bottle from lttstore.com. We see exactly that problem again when we run CSGO, where for some bizarre reason, the situation is flipped on its head. The RTX 3090Ti outperforms the 4090 throughout multiple runs. It's especially surprising because the GPU core clocks and the load remained high. I mean, if you've got an explanation, I'd love to see your take in the comments. Dropping the resolution down to 1440p, it seems like we're becoming even more CPU bound. But critically, the minimum frame rates in Forza Horizon 5 are massively improved, making for a smoother overall experience. Interestingly, CSGO actually manages to return to normalcy at 1440p, so I don't know, maybe we've got a driver bug at 4K or something. Now, do you still remember that cyberpunk results? Yeah, okay. Okay, so check this out. Proportionally, we're looking at an even bigger performance improvement compared to traditional rendering at nearly double the 3090Ti, although we're not quite able to pull off 60 FPS at 4K without DLSS. And when we turn ray tracing on in the much older Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 4090 is capable of nearly doubling the minimum FPS of the 3090Ti. That brings this title from mostly 60 FPS or more at 4K to a buttery smooth 100 to 120 FPS, all without DLSS. With DLSS in performance mode, cyberpunk manages close to 100 FPS and minimum frame rates, enough to be quite smooth with G-Sync enabled so long as you can handle the image quality. Shadow of the Tomb Raider in DLSS quality mode is just ridiculous. Where the 3090Ti can't quite reach 90 FPS and 5% lows, the 4090 is fast enough to comfortably drive 144 hertz 4K monitor. Now, you might be wondering about the new DLSS 3.0, NVIDIA's AI frame generation technology. We're wondering too. Unfortunately, all of our cards, even the third party ones that we're not allowed to show you today, all of them crashed. A lot. Like a lot, a lot, even across multiple benches. As a result, the labs weren't able to properly test DLSS 3.0 and we'd like more ray tracing results than we got. We'll have all of that missing data in a follow-up, so stay tuned. But okay, what if you're not a big gamer? Well, you're in luck because this thing is also a productivity beast. In Blender, it gets over double the samples per minute in both the monster and junk shop scenes and just under double in the older classroom scene. That's a substantial time savings and might be worth it on its own if you're a 3D artist. Similarly, our 4K DaVinci Resolve export finished nearly a minute faster, a difference of roughly 25%, something that that'll also add up over time, especially for timelines with a lot of rendered graphical effects. SpecViewPerf, meanwhile, shows massive gains across the board with the most substantial improvements in 3DS Max, Maya, Medical, and SolidWorks at nearly double the score, while Creo only saw a modest performance improvement of around 10%. Still, this is like looking at a completely different class of GPU, not a typical generational improvement. With all of these performance gains, maybe Nvidia had to price these at $1,600 if they had any hope at all of selling through all of their mining surplus 3090s. Whew, and that's not everything either. Another big part of productivity that many companies, Intel and Apple included, are taking very seriously is video encoding, and Nvidia's out to prove that they're not sleeping on the job. Not only do you get the same high-quality encoder that first debuted on the RTX 20 series as we saw in our DaVinci Resolve test, but you get two of them, and they're both capable of AV1. AV1 is the new codec that's likely to take over for live and on-demand streaming on sites like YouTube and Twitch, and while it can produce significantly better video quality at the same bit rates, it's significantly more time-consuming and difficult to encode, unless you have hardware dedicated for it. Intel Arc launched with it as a headline feature, and it's a safe bet that it'll become more important as time goes on. Unfortunately, we don't have the time right now to do a proper test of it for the review, so again, stay tuned for a future video comparing AV1 encoders. What I can tell you today is that it's nearly as fast as Nvidia's existing H.264 and H.265 encoders, which is pretty impressive. Of course, all of these capabilities come with some drawbacks, the first of which being the power draw. In order to reach the power target that Nvidia set for it, the RTX 4090 universally requires an ATX 3.0 connector and comes with adapters for it in the box. As the specs indicated, our RTX 4090 draws nearly as much power under gaming load as the RTX 3090 Ti, though it did stay closer to 425 watts than it's rated 450. This is a sharp contrast against the RTX 3090 and 6950 XT, which consistently both pulled nearly 100 watts less. This does not bode well for an eventual RTX 4090 Ti. At least the power targets on the 4080 series cards are lower, though we don't have any of those to test today. When we hit the RTX 4090 with a more demanding load via MSI combustor, power consumption skyrockets to the red line for both the RTX 4090 and the 3090 Ti, though curiously about halfway through, it kind of dips down to about 440, which is kind of strange. Meanwhile, the RTX 3090 once again doesn't cross that 350 watt threshold and neither did the 6950 XT. With great power, of course, comes great thermal output capacity and the RTX 4090 is no exception, with thermals while gaming tracking roughly in line with the power consumption. Its massive three and a half slot cooler keeps the hotspot at the 80 degree mark while gaming, placing it squarely between the RTX 3090 and the 6950 XT, despite the power draw, a testament to Nvidia's cooler design. Core clocks were obviously way higher than any previous gen card, and crucially, they remained just as stable throughout the run at about 2.6 and 2.7 gigahertz. When we look again at our combustor results, though, the hotspot temperature crosses the 80 degree threshold along with the RTX 3090 Ti, and we again see that slight dip halfway into the run, while the 3090 sits below 70 degrees. Core clocks end up significantly lower at around 2.25 gigahertz for the 4090, with the 3090 Ti throttling down to below its less power-hungry sibling. Our AMD card, meanwhile, sort of did a heartbeat pattern of boosting and throttling that could result in uneven performance. It's worth noting that these tests were performed inside of a Corsair 5000D Airflow with a 360 millimeter rad up top and three 120 millimeter fans drawing air up front. So it's not like we were starving the cards for oxygen or feeding them hot air from the CPU. In fact, in spite of all the airflow we gave them, the RTX 4090 and 3090 Ti both caused internal case to air temperatures to hit highs of 39 to 40 degrees, with significantly higher minimum internal temperatures than the RTX 3090, all at an ambient temperature of around 21 degrees. That means that if your case can just barely handle a 3090, you won't be able to manage a 4090. Sorry, small form factor aficionados, this card is not for you. After all that, you might look at the spec sheet and have some lingering questions like, why isn't Nvidia supporting PCI Express Gen 5? And where's DisplayPort 2.0? And the answer to those questions, both of them, whether you like it or not, is that Nvidia doesn't think you need them on a $1,600 graphics card. You smell that? That's the distinct scent of copium. While it's true that a GPU running a whole 16 lanes of PCI Express Gen 5 probably won't be super useful today, a GPU running eight lanes of Gen 5 certainly would be, especially for those who also want lots of NVMe storage, a good bet for a card of his class. Remember, the faster the PCI Express link, the fewer the lanes you need for the same bandwidth requirements. Nvidia should know this. As for DisplayPort 2.0, the official line is, DisplayPort 1.0 already supports 8K at 60 hertz and consumer displays won't need more for a while. Which is pretty valid. While it's true that DisplayPort 1.4 only supports up to 120 hertz at full unadulterated resolution, it can go up to 268 hertz with no chroma subsampling using display stream compression, which is purported to be visually lossless. That's pretty good considering displays that can refresh faster than that aren't very common. Still, I would argue that this is a sub-optimal experience on such premium hardware. 240 hertz 4K displays exist today and will have DisplayPort 2.0 support soon. ARK already supports it and RDNA 3 has been confirmed to support DisplayPort 2.0 since May. Nvidia is clearly trying to save a buck. Again, on a GPU that costs as much as a Series X, a PS5, a Switch, and a Steam Deck combined. Or maybe these cards were just ready and waiting in a warehouse for longer than we realized. It's incredibly amusing to me that the first GPU that might actually be capable of running 8K gaming without asterisks is being handled in such a lackadaisical fashion by Team Green. The days of generational performance per dollar gains are over, they say. Moore's law is dead, they say. And yet, the competition doesn't seem to think so. While it's true that nobody can touch the 4090's mammoth performance right now, as we saw with the RTX 3090, that won't last forever. And that's where things get weird. As it exists right now, while the RTX 4090 chugs as much power as an RTX 3090 Ti, it is a massive upgrade over both that card and the vanilla 3090 in nearly every respect, well in excess of its price increase. For content creators, this is a no-brainer. But I cannot in good conscience recommend gamers with more dollars than cents go out and purchase a piece of hardware that is incapable of driving the also very expensive displays that might actually be able to take advantage of it. Especially when a less expensive and less power-hungry card, perhaps even Nvidia's own RTX 4080's, can do the same thing. Just like I can tell you about our sponsor. Nord Security, if you keep up with the tech news, you know that hackers are always looking for new ways to compromise everything from tech giant servers to grandma's computer. Thankfully, Nord Security's well-rounded protection package is there to help protect your files, devices, and personal data online. 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