Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Review

Here's our first expect at the new GeForce RTX 3090, Nvidia's latest 'Titan' class GPU. Although it's non actually called a Titan -- we approximate RTX Titan was already taken -- RTX 3090 works for u.s. and perhaps more than importantly, when compared to many of the previous Titan-grade products, we feel the 3090 is more significant.

The RTX 3090 is like to the Maxwell Titan Ten as information technology packs more than VRAM and more cores than the next fastest GeForce GPU. In this case, it features 21% more CUDA cores than the RTX 3080 and more than than twice as much VRAM with an insane 24GB of GDDR6X retention, and of form a titanic $1500 price tag.

Nvidia was quick to point out that gamers shouldn't expect something that's going to compete strongly in terms of cost per frame with the RTX 3090. This is a production for those who only desire the all-time, a no-compromise type solution. Nvidia also noted they were surprised by only how much need there was for such a product on previous iterations. That demand came from content creators likewise as gamers seeking the ultimate performance and those all important bragging rights.

That is the RTX 3090 in a nutshell, if you tin can afford information technology and want the best out there. The only potential use case where we'd say the 3090 is required is for those who can take advantage of the massive 24 GB VRAM buffer, which could exist highly benign for animation and 3D modeling tools like Autodesk Maya or Blender, or video editors working with 8K raw footage.

If you lot autumn into ane of those categories and know your software can take full advantage of the fast and aplenty retentiveness capacity, the RTX 3090 is going to be exceptionally adept value. Typically though, when nosotros review GPUs we mostly dedicate to the enthusiast and gamer crowd, and today'southward review won't be any different.

The focus of this review will exist on the RTX 3090 GPU, not Nvidia's Founders Edition graphics bill of fare. But because this thing is and then insane, we'll give y'all a few quick stats: it measures 313mm long, stands 124mm alpine, and is 52mm thick -- information technology'south a beast in terms of dimensions and does take upwardly 3 expansion slots. But the near impressive stat is its weight, this thing tips the scales at 2125 grams (4.7 pounds), making it the heaviest graphics card nosotros've e'er seen.

Pulling and pushing air through the maze of heatsinks are two 110mm fans and similar the RTX 3080 Iron model, air is exhausted all over the place and we'll await at thermal performance later in the review. Then around at the I/O console we get the same configuration as the RTX 3080: 1 HDMI ii.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. It's a seriously impressive graphics card and the best blueprint Nvidia has produced past a country mile.

In addition to our usual battery of gaming benchmarks, we'll briefly touch on Blender performance. Anticipating this is not a value-seeking graphics card, we won't weight our conclusions too heavily on things like toll per frame, though it will remain office of our analysis. Spoiler alert: games don't require 24 GB of VRAM withal.

	GeForce RTX 3090	GeForce RTX 3080	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Price	$1500	$700	$1200
Release Date	September 2020	September 2020	September 2018
Procedure	Samsung 8N		TSMC12FFN
Transistors (billion)	28		18.6
Die Size (mm2)	628.iv		754
Core Config	10496 / 328 / 112	8704 / 272 / 96	4352 / 272 / 88
Cadre Clock Frequency	1400 / 1700 MHz	1440 / 1710 MHz	1350 / 1545 MHz
Retentivity Capacity	24 GB	10 GB	xi GB
Memory Speed	19.5 Gbps	nineteen Gbps	14 Gbps
Memory Type	GDDR6X		GDDR6
Jitney Type / Bandwidth	384-bit / 935.8 GB/southward	320-bit / 760 GB/s	352-bit / 616 GB/s
TGP	320 watt	320 watt	250 watt

Here'due south a side-by-side spec comparison with the RTX 3080. Both GPUs are based on the same GA102 dice, the 3080 is but a cutdown version. Every bit mentioned earlier the 3090 packs 21% more than CUDA cores as well as 21% more texture mapping units, only simply 17% more render output units or ROPs. In terms of core clock speeds both are like, but the 3090 receives slightly faster GDDR6X retentivity hitting nineteen.5 Gbps and when paired with the 384-scrap wide retention motorbus is skilful for 935.8 GB/south of retention bandwidth, then a 23% increase over the 3080.

Based on those figures you'd await the RTX 3090 will at most be ~17% faster than the 3080 in games, but due to the way these architectures typically calibration, in most games the gains are probably going to exist less than that, making the RTX 3080 the more attractive graphics card for a majority of high-end gamers.

For testing we're using a Ryzen 9 3950X system, featuring four sticks of low latency DDR4-3200 memory operating in a dual-channel, dual-rank configuration. The focus will be on 4K gaming results, though we'll also include 1440p criterion data also.

Benchmarks

Starting with Decease Stranding we see that the 1440p results are very underwhelming, though nosotros could be a little CPU express here. Even when increasing the resolution to 4K, which sees the GPU become the primary organisation bottleneck, the RTX 3090 is a mere vi% faster than the 3080, taking the average frame charge per unit from 107 fps to 113 fps. We weren't expecting a ton, but we've got to say this is a discouraging result.

Next up we have Horizon Zip Dawn and we're once more looking at weak performance gains at 1440p, simply a 7% bound over the RTX 3080...

At 4K resolution the only performance limiting component is the graphics card and despite that the RTX 3090 is just 8% faster than the 3080, taking the average frame rate from 73 fps to 79 fps. Nosotros do meet a healthy 18% heave to the 1% low performance, only fifty-fifty that is underwhelming for this comparison.

Rainbow Six Siege sees a 10% boost at 1440p which takes us from 327 fps with the RTX 3080 to 360 fps with the RTX 3090, not amazing merely it is a double-digit gain.

The 4K results are more impressive with a fifteen% operation uplift and nosotros tin can tell you straight abroad this is the biggest margin nosotros saw in the 14 games we tested, so... we volition avert repeating ourselves with another 11 titles and simply sum it all up in one larger graph.

Performance Summary

Here's our xiv game average for all the 1080p, 1440p and 4K benchmark information we gathered. Nosotros'll also check out ability consumption, price per frame, and the margins seen in individual titles. Oh, and then a quick expect at the Blender render performance.

Starting with 1080p operation, we're looking at a modest v% uplift over the RTX 3080 and a 21% increase over the RTX 2080 Ti, the only two relevant GPUs for this comparison. At 1440p the margin over the RTX 3080 grows to 8% and at that place's a 32% spring over the 2080 Ti. So spending 114% more on the RTX 3090 is going to be a pretty tough sell for an 8% increase at 1440p gaming, but then who are we kidding. Those with deep enough pockets won't hesitate to snap upward that price to performance ratio.

Finally, for those gaming at 4K, the RTX 3090 offers on average 11% more than functioning over the RTX 3080. If yous're coming from an RTX 2080 Ti, that'southward a very respectable 45% increase in performance for a 25% increase in price.

The RTX 3090 FE doesn't eat much more power than the RTX 3080, at least when measuring the entire organisation consumption from the wall. We're nonetheless shy of 600 watts, and then a decent 750 W unit will accept yous more than covered, at least without overclocking.

Using the Nvidia PCAT tool we run into that the RTX 3090 consumes merely 6% more than power than the 3080 which is surprising, though information technology was but 11% faster in this examination. Nonetheless, not a bad issue and it explains why the RTX 3090 Iron card runs so cool which we'll look at in a moment, simply beginning here is a await at performance per watt.

Based on these figures, the RTX 3090 is actually better than the 3080 in terms of operation per watt, no incertitude this is due to a binning procedure that sees the best silicon reserved for the 3090. In terms of efficiency, the 3090 is surprisingly expert.

The "absurd" thing about the massive RTX 3090 Founders Edition are the absurd operating temperatures. Well, that and the fact that it is virtually silent. After an hour of gaming the fans spun at just over g RPM where they were quieter than the other fans in our test arrangement and therefore couldn't be heard. Despite that, the GPU peaked at just 66C and maintained an average clock speed of 1830 MHz. Very impressive stuff and a strong case for that massive heatsink.

Here's a expect at cost per frame, which isn't overly relevant for a production similar the GeForce RTX 3090, merely since nosotros have the information, why not share it. No surprises here, the RTX 3090 is not a good value proposition for gamers, but it's as well amusing to see that despite costing $1500, it's far ameliorate value than the RTX 2080 Ti.

Furthermore, at 4K the RTX 3090 is considerably better value than the RTX 2080 Ti and information technology'southward non much worse than parts released last year like the Radeon 7, for case. It's also crazy to see that in modern games it gets close to the GTX 1080, a GPU that was class-leading for its time.

Performance per Game

RTX 3090 vs RTX 3080

Here's a look at the percentage gains offered by the RTX 3090 over the 3080 in all the titles tested, starting with the 1440p information. Every bit you tin run across at best it was sixteen% faster in Globe War Z, just typically we're looking at loftier single digit gains.

At 4K we're not CPU limited in any of the tests. A 5.three GHz 10700K for example, provides the exact same frame rates in all titles tested with the RTX 3090. The 3090 was 10% faster on average with the biggest margin seen in Earth War Z once again, where the 3090 was 18% faster.

RTX 3090 vs RTX 2080 Ti

For those hoping to upgrade from a 2080 Ti, the peak gain nosotros observed was a 44% performance improvement in Resident Evil 3. Typically though you are looking at about a 30% performance uplift, which is most what the 2080 Ti offered over the 1080 Ti for a 70% increase in cost.

The margins are even better at 4K and at present the RTX 3090 is up to 58% faster than the 2080 Ti.

We typically don't test GPU productivity functioning in any of our reviews, but we went alee and chop-chop tested a few GPUs in Blender. Here we can see that the Radeon VII was comparable to the RTX 2080 Ti in this application and that made it a peachy value option, though it wasn't that much faster than the vanilla 2080.

The RTX 3080 is a little over twice equally fast equally the Radeon Vii in this test, boosting operation past 108%, or if y'all go the other way it reduced the render time by 52%.

We see that the RTX 3090 is xviii% faster than the 3080 in Blender, which is in line with our best example gaming performance margin. Unless your workload requires more than 10 GB of VRAM, you lot're just much improve off with the RTX 3080 in terms of value. As we said before, it's a simple equation for those running productivity tasks: if your workload requires a lot more x GB of VRAM, the 3090 could exist a godsend, if not, information technology's kind of pointless.

Bottom Line

The GeForce RTX 3090 is non nearly every bit heady equally last calendar week's RTX 3080 release, merely as soon equally Jensen said this was a Titan form product, we knew what we were in for. If you lot're a PC gamer, the RTX 3090 doesn't really brand much sense. The massive 24GB VRAM buffer has no appeal hither, and despite Nvidia'south best efforts, 8K gaming just isn't a matter, hell even 4K is withal niche.

Nosotros did try out 8K gaming and it was impressive seeing 60 fps in Doom Eternal. It was also possible to average 60 fps in Control with the aid of DLSS, rendering at 1440p, but then this is non true 8K gaming. Without DLSS, Command ran at v fps, so information technology'due south a bit stretch claiming 8K gaming given for the nigh role y'all volition require DLSS support for it to happen. Doom Eternal did work well, it looks swell, and we saw VRAM usage hit 16GB -- actual usage, non merely resource allotment.

Either manner, nosotros doubt gamers are slap-up for that 60 Hz 8K experience but all the same. With about gamers targeting 1440p 144Hz, the RTX 3090 has picayune to offer over the 3080. This is also true when using a heavily overclocked Intel processor. Likewise, productivity tasks won't take total reward of the RTX 3090 unless you can utilize that extra memory. If you lot do demand 24 GB of VRAM, then the RTX 3090 is awesome. Previously you were looking at having to spend $2500 on a Titan RTX for the same retention capacity.

Lastly, the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition model is truly outstanding and is probably going to be 1 of the best RTX 3090 graphics cards, if non the best.