With the announcement of the new RTX 4000 series graphic cards from Nvidia, we finally have a new king of the graphics card world – the GeForce RTX 4090. Based on the brand new ‘Ada Lovelace‘ architecture, the RTX 4090 is being advertised as the most powerful desktop graphics card ever made. But before the RTX 4090 can take the title of the king, like all potential challengers, it has to carry out a coup. And that, in today’s graphics market, means to go against the RTX 3090 Ti. The current king of graphic cards has held on to the title for the past six months and has done so quite comfortably. Until now, no graphics card has been able to challenge Nvidia’s powerful RTX 3090 Ti GPU in pure performance. However, does that change with the new RTX 4090? Let’s find out in this comparison between the RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti.
With the new RTX 4090 exceeding expectations both in terms of features and performance, we thought that it would be interesting to see how this new GPU compares to the last generation’s flagship GPU, the RTX 3090 Ti. In this guide, we will look at the various features and hardware developments that come with the new generation of Nvidia cards and find out how exactly they stack up against the older cards.
- RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Specs SheetRTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Architecture & CoresRTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Design ComparisonRTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: What Are the New Features?RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: PerformanceRTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Benchmark (Leaked)RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Pricing
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Specs Sheet
Before we go on to explore all the new features and details of the RTX 4090, let’s first have a general overlook at the specifications. The first thing you will notice with the RTX 4090is that there’s a significant bump in almost all aspects of the card, from the CUDA cores to the clock speeds.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Architecture & Cores
Now that the general specs overview is done, it’s time to explore the biggest change in the new GPU, and that’s the architecture.
The other big change at the level of GPU architecture is the small bump that the new 400-series card has seen in both RT and Tensor cores. The RTX 4090 has 84 RT cores against 3090 Ti’s 82 cores and 336 Tensor cores compared to 328 on the RTX 3090 Ti. This might not seem like a big jump in terms of raw numbers, but as Nvidia has claimed, these cores are different from the older ones and can’t objectively be compared.
Coming to the tensor cores, the new cards include the 4th generation Tensor cores that come with exclusive features like the Optical Flow accelerator, the magical tool that makes DLSS 3 possible (more on this later).
Now coming to the realm of design, at first sight, one could easily think that the form factor of the new RTX 4090 is the same as that of the 3090 Ti. But if you look at the design carefully, you would come to realize that the basic design principle (the dual axial flow-through) is the same as the RTX 3090, but there are subtle differences, like in the way that the fans are designed.
The cooling solution might be similar, but the part of the card that has drastically changed is the power connector. With RTX 3090 and 3080 GPUs, Nvidia came up with a proprietary 12-pin power pin called Molex Micro fit 3. It was a revolutionary standard that had the capability of delivering up to 600 watts of power. But with the release of the RTX 4090, it seems that the 12-pin standard is dead. The new RTX 4090 and 4080 cards come with a single 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power cable that’s radically different from the old solution. In terms of power delivery, though, it’s the same – with a peak power capability of 600W.
The new RTX 4090 graphics card doesn’t just come with core hardware upgrades but also includes a plethora of newly added features. Just like every generation, Nvidia has been hard at work to deliver us the most cutting-edge features. Nvidia made it clear that if they wanted to reach a new level of performance, just architectural upgrades weren’t going to cut it.
The biggest feature upgrade that comes with the new RTX 4000 series cards is the inclusion of DLSS 3, which is a totally new integration of Nvidia’s prior AI-enhanced super sampling techniques – DLSS and DLSS 2.0. This feature essentially allows the GPU to generate entirely new frames instead of just pixels.
Shader-Execution Reordering
The second big feature that we see in the RT cores is the inclusion of Shader-execution reordering. The working of this mechanism is, well, complicated. But to simplify it, one can think of it as a more efficient scheduling system that makes the process of calculating ray-tracing data much more efficient.
AV1 Encoding Support
The final feature we will be looking at wasn’t talked about at the Nvidia GTC conference but is heavily referenced in the blog post. This new feature is support for AV1 encoding. Now, at first glance, support for a brand new codec might not seem like a big deal, but we think it is.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Performance
Now that we’ve gone through the drudgery of looking at the details of the specifications and features, it’s finally time to move on to the most important question – how does the RTX 4090 compare in relation to the RTX 3090 Ti? Well, Nvidia claims that it’s a generational improvement over the previous card, but how much of it is marketing, and how much of it is the truth? Let’s have a look:
At the GTC conference, Nvidia made the recurring claim that the new 4000-series cards will be twice as performant as the corresponding 3000-series card in classical-rasterized games and up to four times as fast in ray-tracing games.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Benchmark (Leaked)
Now, this is where leaked details about the performance of the RTX 4090 come into play. We haven’t really seen many leaks for the newest RTX 4090 graphics card, but there was one that occurred a few weeks ago. The leak is not without its issues, but it might give us some idea of what to expect from the RTX 4090 in terms of performance in non-optimized games.
The leak that we are referring to came from a now-deleted post on the Chiphell forum. It didn’t specifically say that the screencap showed the benchmark results for an Nvidia RTX 4090, but the mysterious graphic card scored a mind-boggling score of 20,192 in 3Dmark Time Spy Extreme, which according to many graphics card experts lies in the same ball-park as the performance improvement that Nvidia has claimed for their RTX 4090.
RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 Ti: Pricing
Finally, another aspect in which the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 Ti differ is the release price. Nvidia unveiled the RTX 3090 Ti GPU on April 2022 for a retail price of $1,999. This was a huge gamble by Nvidia at the time, as it was nearly $500 more expensive than the RTX 3090. And surprisingly, that was only for the founder’s edition card produced by Nvidia. Third-party cards from brands like ASUS, MSI, or Zotac could reach upwards of $2,100, which made it one of the most expensive consumer graphics cards ever released.
Without both graphics cards in our hands, a direct apples-to-apples comparison is just not possible. A ton of information about the RTX 4090 is still up in the air, and many questions remain unanswered. But we hope that through this article, you did get some idea of what to expect in terms of performance and features from the RTX 4000 cards, particularly, when compared to its Ampere sibling.