of GeForce RTX 4090 continues to reign as the fastest best graphics card Available now and even better: The price looks like it’s finally under $2,000. PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB (opens in new tab)available on Amazon. Non-RGB variant about $50 cheaper (opens in new tab)It’s still a few hundred dollars above Nvidia’s $1,599 starting MSRP, but it’s getting closer. Perhaps by the time the 40-series refresh cards start showing up, we’ll see a price that’s actually acceptable (but don’t expect it).
A big part of the problem with the RTX 4090 is its exceptional performance.Up to 50% faster than the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti Improve game performance without using DLSS 3. It also provides significant speedups for many professional workloads and AI tasks. And the next step, his RTX 4080, is still expensive and noticeably slow, so those with money are simply opting for the best.
It’s been three months and the newness has worn off a bit, but how does the RTX 4090 look? Check out PNY’s reference clock RTX 4090 XLR8 Gaming Verto Epic-X RGB to find out. The rest of this review applauds product names with adjectives.
| graphics card | PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB | RTX4090 | RTX4080 | RTX 4070 Ti | RX7900XTX | RX7900XT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| architecture | AD102 | AD102 | AD103 | AD104 | Navi 31 | Navi 31 |
| process technology | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC N5+N6 | TSMC N5+N6 |
| Transistor (billion) | 76.3 | 76.3 | 45.9 | 35.8 | 45.6 + 6x 2.05 | 45.6 + 5x 2.05 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 608.4 | 608.4 | 378.6 | 294.5 | 300 + 222 | 300 + 185 |
| SMS | 128 | 128 | 76 | 60 | 96 | 84 |
| GPU shader | 16384 | 16384 | 9728 | 7680 | 12288 | 10752 |
| Tensor cores | 512 | 512 | 304 | 240 | none | none |
| Ray Tracing “Core” | 128 | 128 | 76 | 60 | 96 | 84 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 2520 | 2520 | 2505 | 2610 | 2500 | 2400 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | twenty one | twenty one | 22.4 | twenty one | 20 | 20 |
| VRAM (GB) | twenty four | twenty four | 16 | 12 | twenty four | 20 |
| VRAM bus width | 384 | 384 | 256 | 192 | 384 | 320 |
| L2 cache | 72 | 72 | 64 | 48 | 96 | 80 |
| ROP | 176 | 176 | 112 | 80 | 192 | 192 |
| TMU | 512 | 512 | 304 | 240 | 384 | 336 |
| TFLOPS FP32 | 82.6 | 82.6 | 48.7 | 40.1 | 61.4 | 51.6 |
| TFLOPS FP16 (FP8/INT8) | 661 (1321) | 661 (1321) | 390 (780) | 321 (641) | 123 (123) | 103 (103) |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 1008 | 1008 | 717 | 504 | 960 | 800 |
| TBP (Watts) | 450 | 450 | 320 | 285 | 355 | 300 |
| release date | October 2022 | October 2022 | November 2022 | January 2023 | December 2022 | December 2022 |
| launch price | $1,599 | $1,599 | $1,199 | $799 | $999 | $899 |
Having a second reference clock card is a bit odd as most companies tend to send overclocked models. Obviously, this means it will have the same specs as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, which will likely perform worse than competing cards. So if you want decent power consumption and don’t mind the final 3-5% increase in performance, this is good enough.
People are more likely to be interested in PNY cards if they are in stock at near MSRP. All other areas are pretty much the same, and a few hundred bucks savings is always appreciated, even for extreme performance graphics cards.
As for competition, AMD basically stops at the RTX 4080 level. RX7900 XTX and XT GPUs. Whether you’re looking at Nvidia or AMD cards, there’s a relatively large gap between the 4090 and the next step down. Despite the lack of Titan branding and certain Titan features (such as unlocked drivers in some professional applications), there are effectively Titan alternatives, at least for the real future. Titan RTX Arrive (assuming it is shipped).
