NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB “Ada” Founders Edition Review – BFGPU Perfected

Conclusion

The road to Ada was sure an exciting one. We got to see various rumors, leaks, and speculation & now we finally have the final product in our hands. There was sure a lot of hype surrounding the RTX 40 series cards and we will see whether the flagship card lives up to the expectations or not.

What Does Ada Bring To The Table?

The three major things that Ada is bringing to the table is a revamped architecture on all three fronts. The CUDA architecture has been given an update, the ray tracing cores have been given an update and the tensor cores have been given an update too. Not only are these three key areas upgraded to a new core design but they also introduce brand-new features. The new ray-tracing cores come with optimized ways to handle BVH processing and this can be seen in both games & applications that use ray-traced render paths. The new tensor cores not only boost existing DLSS performance but with DLSS 3 and frame-generation algorithms, we get to see a quantum leap in performance versus native resolution. And finally, we have raster performance where we got to see a jump anywhere from 50-80% (depending on the title). The average mostly settles around 60% but that itself is a big jump.

Ada is simply a quantum leap in all regards and its only gonna get better from here!

So here's the thing. If you were running an RTX 3090 series graphics card, you will immediately get a 50-80% performance boost without any DLSS or RT applied. With RT applied, the card sees less of a hit in performance versus the Ampere cores. The Ada cores just love RT and in ray tracing-heavy titles, you will notice that the performance gets closer to the 2x claim more often than rasterization. But with that said, ray tracing is still one of the most costly effects to enable in games and taxes the GPU a lot. That's where DLSS 3 comes in. While Ada can definitely handle most ray tracing games at 4K 60 FPS natively, you can get a further boost by leveraging DLSS 3 and that boost takes the perf to the next level. We got to see anywhere from 3-4x gains and in a few cases, our gains were above 4x, which is simply impressive.

Where the GeForce RTX 4090 truly shines is in the world of creative professionals who know they can put that massive VRAM pool to use for more than just gaming. Working with 8K Raw Footage in Davinci Resolve was a breeze on the RTX 4090 as well as the RTX 3090, but the RTX 4090 was able to present that experience for savings of a smooth grand. VRAY performance on the new Ada architecture is through the roof. The same goes for OctaneRender so long as you have the VRAM to support it otherwise, you'll find yourself stumbling. Blender really benefits from the architectural improvements and shows quite the speedup (2X) over the RTX 3090 when the other cards just don't have the VRAM to keep up.

"But I heard it consumes 900W & requires a new PSU"

Ok, so let's get a few things straight as the power consumption and temperatures discussion going around the Ada Lovelace GPUs has been baseless. So I would like to make sure this is as loud & clear as possible!

No It Doesn't Consumes Anywhere Close To 500W In Gaming And If Are Already Running A PSU That Is Rated At 1000W Or Above, You Are Good To Upgrade!

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition has a TBP of 450W. The only applications that made it push that many watts were either synthetic benchmarks of power bugs such as Furmark or similar stress tests. I was playing Forza Horizon 5 at 4K with everything maxed out and got over 100 FPS while the GPU consumed 300W of power. The graphics card offered a +50% higher performance than the RTX 3090 Ti which consumed around 400W of power in the same game. That's not all; the graphics card also never broke past the 60C in this particular test, while the RTX 3090 Ti was running around 68C.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is a very efficient card. With a 2 GHz locked clock speed, I got +35% better performance in Bright Infinite RTX benchmark versus a 2 GHz clocked RTX 3090 Ti. The RTX 4090 consumed 245W of power, whereas the RTX 3090 Ti consumed around 440W of power to reach 2 GHz and was still nowhere close to the 4090 Ada. In gaming, the card would mostly run at around 400W and certain ray tracing titles will make it go past 440W but even then, it is offering 60-80% higher performance than an RTX 3090.

NVIDIA's RTX 4090 is the coolest flagship graphics card to date, literally!

And to answer the question of whether you really need one of those fancy ATX 3.0 PSUs? Well, you really don't. As I said, if you have a good 1000W+ PSU, that's more than enough but if you are planning to build an entirely new PSU, then investing in the latest ATX 3.0 standard will be a good choice but not a required one.

I would suggest that anyone who plans on getting an RTX 4090 makes sure they have a fast CPU. The RTX 4090 demand a lot of processing power to be coupled with and even the Core i9-12900K can become a bit of a bottleneck in some cases. Overclocking the 12900K is the way to go & it's even better if you plan on getting a Ryzen 7000 or Intel 13th Gen PC.

Founders Edition or AIB?

Today we are only looking at the Founders Edition RTX 4090. You will have to wait till tomorrow to see how the AIB variants stack up against it, but NVIDIA's new Founders Edition cooler is just as big of a BFGPU as we saw with the 3090 Ti. In fact, it's just slightly thicker but takes up 3 slots like its last-gen brother. The Founders Edition design is well, well-built! It looks gorgeous and performs well too. I can't spot any flaw in the FE besides the fact that it's one hell of a thing to take apart to get a look at that shiny new V-shaped PCB. I wish NVIDIA would streamline the disassembly process a bit and they do offer a great guide on how to do so but it's just the only thing I can criticize right now.

The new Founders Edition design feels more premium than anything that came before and works like a wonder!

The cooler performs really well. At stock operation, you are mostly close to 60C. This was on a Cooler Master C700M with its side panel closed and using a quad-pair of Lian Li Uni-fans. So while the full-tower case does provide more room for the RTX 4090 to breathe, you may get different fan speeds and temps using a mid-tower case. The RTX 4090 itself, in all honesty, is a hard fit in some mid-tower cases due to its big size.

One major area where we see a vast improvement in temperatures is memory. The optimized G6X from Micron runs 10C cooler than the previous gen. We all know that there's no good way to push memory to its extreme than to run a mining algorithm on it and that's what I resorted to using. The memory peaked out at 72C (noted via HWiNFO) after 30 mins while overclocking the memory to +1350 MHz resulted in 77C temps after 30 mins of stress testing. That's very good, and no gaming workload is going to stress the memory this much. I also noticed that the card wasn't as hot even after prolonged use. I could easily grab the card and pull it out of the motherboard, whereas the RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti graphics cards remained warm even after a couple of minutes of pulling them out.

Is It Worth The Price?

The $1599 US MSRP for the GeForce RTX 4090 is $100 US more than the launch MSRP of the RTX 3090 ($1499 US) and $400 US lower than the launch MSRP of the RTX 3090 Ti ($1999 US). If we are to go by the MSRPs and the performance jump, then the RTX 4090 offers a 60-80% performance for a 7% higher price. However, given the graphics market right now, those MSRPs are invalidated by the fall in demand for graphics cards and the decline within the PC market itself.

The RTX 4090 is the best that money can buy right now but will this be true in the next few months?

New RTX 3090s can be found for around $900 US, while 3090 Tis can be found for $1000 US. Based on these prices, the RTX 4090 costs 60% more (for the FE). It may not be the best value proposition right now but it is also the fastest graphics card on the market.

Users who bought the 3090 or the 3090 Ti didn't seem to care much about the pricing at all. They paid far worse prices, too, because the 3090 and 3090 Ti were never available at their MSRPs when they got launched. Both cards were priced above $2000 US for almost the entirety of their existence. So for those who already paid a high price, a $1599 US product with this big of a perf jump will look super attractive. For the standard consumer, the RTX 4090 will feel like an expensive product based on the current prices for the last-gen flagships.

Conclusion

This is a magnitude of a performance leap that we haven't seen since the GTX 1080 Ti.  Going from 980 Ti to 1080 Ti was a 60-70% performance jump. Going from 2080 Ti to 3090 was a 50-60% perf jump. The RTX 4090 is a cut-down die and offering a 70% increase already means that NVIDIA has really outdone itself in offering one of the biggest gen over-gen performance increases. This is an absolute beast of a card that simply has no competition at the moment.

From gaming to content creation, NVIDIA has truly nailed its flagship GeForce RTX 4090, offering the richest suite of GPU features and capabilities that are unmatched by its rivals and further extending its leadership in the world of ray-tracing and AI processing with DLSS 3. The RTX 4090 is truly a revolutionary product & what scares me more is that this isn't even the full Ada unleashed yet!

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