NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 looks like an absolute beast in ray-tracing supported titles. Courtesy of the performance boost granted by DLSS 3 and the additional shaders on the AD102 die, the Ada Lovelace flagship is a whopping 3x (nearly) faster than the RTX 3090 Ti in Cyberpunk 2077. The GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition, like the 3090 Ti features 24GB of GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit bus, only faster (21Gbps vs 24Gbps).
Much of the gains come from DLSS 3. The 3090 Ti roughly doubles its performance in CBP 2077 with DLSS 2 (Quality Preset), and the RTX 4090 doubles its average frame rate, courtesy of DLSS 3. The former goes from 36 FPS to 62 FPS while the latter has its frame rate boosted from 60 FPS at stock to 170 FPS with DLSS 3.
| Cyberpunk 2077 1440p Max | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE |
|---|---|---|
| DLSS | Quality (DLSS 3) | Quality (DLSS 2) |
| Native->DLSS (FPS) | 59.9->170.7 | 35.8->61.9 |
| FP32 Cores | 16,384 | 10,752 |
| Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 24GB GDDR6X |
| Memory Clock | 24Gbps | 21Gbps |
| L2 Cache | 72MB | 6MB |
| Bus Width | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| Core Clock | >2,800 MHz | ~2,000 MHz |
| Temp | 50-53C | >80C |
| TBP | 348.9W | >400W |
Furthermore, the RTX 4090 runs at temps of just over 50C, substantially lower than the RTX 3090 Ti’s peak of 80-84C. The other core difference comes in the form of the massive L2 cache. To accommodate the BVH structures required for ray-tracing, the L2 has been bumped up from 6MB to 72MB, an increase of 12x.
