So let’s talk performance. Combined, Nvidia claimed these new Ada Lovelace cards can be up to two to four times faster than their Ampere predecessors in the most demanding 4K RT workloads, and that’s borne out by our testing. The extent of the increase depends on the game and the settings, but this card more or less “solves” current-gen games - you can basically choose the highest possible settings and enjoy high frame-rates, maxing out even a 4K 144Hz monitor in most titles. It’s an incredible turn of events, and one that makes the extremely high price point of the 4090 seem more reasonable than it first appeared. Nvidia has accomplished this by designing a denser chip with a higher power target and more advanced hardware features, adding up to a powerful piece of kit. Looking at the specs it’s clear to see some eye-popping figures in terms of compute, memory bandwidth and power consumption - on top of a process shrink to TSMC’s 4N process, design changes and new-generation shader cores, RT cores and Tensor cores. This level of performance means we’ve seen substantial demand for these cards upon launch. So: here’s what you need to know about the RTX 4090, including the retailers in the US and UK that offer this highly vaunted GPU for sale! Our RTX 4090 review includes performance figures for a wide range of games, including traditional rasterised titles, games with ray tracing and special analyses of power consumption, DLSS 2 and DLSS 3. Rich’s summing up of the card is quite powerful, I think: This leads into another question - why is the RTX 4090 so expensive? Certainly both Nvidia and its partners want to make a healthy profit, recouping their investments into research and development, but there are other factors in play as well. More advanced processes, like TSMC’s 4N used here, are more expensive than their predecessors to produce. Global conflicts and pandemics also continue to impact supply chains. However, ultimately the price is set at what Nvidia thinks the market will bear, and only GPUs remaining on store shelves, unsold, are likely to motivate any kind of downward shift in prices.
