IF YOU’VE SEEN OUR RTX 4090 REVIEW, you won’t need me to tell you that this card is a gaming powerhouse, offering a genuine leap forward over the previous generation in terms of raw performance. In the benchmarks, I used our 4K ‘Ultra’ machine from our July 2022 issue as a Zero Point comparison. That machine cost roughly the same price ($3,600) and used the topend components available then, including an RTX 3090 graphics card, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, and 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM. All I can say is, what a difference six months makes. At 4K, we get a doubling of performance in Metro Exodus RTX, close to double in the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra score, and even at the lowest improvement in Cyberpunk 2077, we still see a 63 percent gain. CPU performance offers less of a leap forward, with a 33 percent boost to single-core tasks and a 24 percent increase to multicore. That’s still pretty impressive, though.
Those benchmarks only test core computational performance, they don’t take into account the benefits of DLSS 3 upscaling, as we turn such performance enhancers off in our testing. With DLSS 3 being exclusive to the RTX 40-series of GPUs, there are undoubtedly more performance benefits to be gained, which is where Nvidia gets its ‘2x-3x’ performance claims over the 30-series in its marketing. It’s a bit early to declare whether it’s worth upgrading to gain access to DLSS 3 because, at the time of writing, showpieces for the tech such as Portal RTX haven’t been released yet. For more on DLSS 3 though, and the best games to test on your new 4090-based system, turn to page 30.