NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Graphics Card

Product Information

The basic design of the RTX 3090 is similar to other Nvidia Ampere cards, only this card is much bigger. (Image credit: Future) In games like World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and Destiny 2, we were able to get a steady 60-70 fps at this extremely high resolution, but with quality settings at high, rather than having all the eye candy turned on. This isn't as big a loss as it sounds, as the 24GB of VRAM is enough so that we didn't have to turn down textures. But while the RT Core takes on a huge bulk of that workload, ray tracing is still a very computationally expensive technology, which means that it still has a heavy performance cost, which is why DLSS is becoming more and more important, both in gaming and in programs like D5 Render. Now that we've all been working from home for so long, and with it looking like that's going to become the new normal, anything that makes video conferencing less stressful is a huge benefit. The best part is that this technology is available to anyone with an Nvidia RTX-powered device.

This comes with a sizable 3-5% performance loss, but otherwise provides a good glimpse at what 8K gaming performance looks like. As you may be able to discern from the charts above, the RTX 3090 doesn't provide the straight 8K 60 fps experience in the most demanding games on PC. But like most things, it's complicated.There's plenty of reasons why people may want to buy the RTX 3090, as it's a cutting edge and future-proof graphics card that can also dabble in 8K gaming. Oh lawd it's coming. We reported yesterday that RTX 3090 TI Founders Edition cards are likely to be just as big as the prior RTX 3090 versions. That means this one will probably be another three-slot GPU - an absolute giant in GPU terms. Surprisingly, 8K gaming is actually a possibility for this card, although it does take some sacrifices to get there. Most people will instead choose to game at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, the resolutions Digital Foundry tested more in-depth in their RTX 3090 review. Compared to the RTX 3080, the 3090 is around 10 to 15 per cent faster at 4K, with a narrower gap - on average - at lower resolutions. The RTX 3090 is an impressively huge graphics card, thanks in large part to its incredible cooling solution that keeps this powerful GPU running at a safe temperature, but that does mean that a lot of cases won't be able to fit it. It is a bit unsightly, however, and it's hard to have the same kind of clean cable setup as you would have otherwise. However, third-party graphics card manufacturers are using the same 8-pin power connector as always, so you can always just go with one of those if you need to.

It's strange to give the RTX 3090 credit for its value proposition, given that its such an expensive card, but considering that this is much more of a prosumer/professional card, this is downright cheap for a workstation-class GPU. Where the RTX 3090 really shines, however, is in 3D Rendering and encoding, making it hugely compelling to creative professionals that need this level of performance without investing thousands of dollars in a Quadro or Tesla card.

Top Tier Gaming With GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPUs

At first glance, the small bump up from the 72 SMs on the Nvidia Turing-based Titan RTX seems like a minor improvement, but one of the most groundbreaking differences with the Ampere architecture is the ability for both datapaths on each SM being able to handle FP32 workloads. This means that CUDA core counts per SM is effectively doubled, which is why the RTX 3090 is such a rendering behemoth. The redesign of the PCB on the RTX 3090 requires a whole new 12-pin power connector. (Image credit: Future)