NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Graphics Card

Product Information

The redesign of the PCB on the RTX 3090 requires a whole new 12-pin power connector. (Image credit: Future) The RTX 3090 is an expensive graphics card, without question, so if it is just a little bit too expensive for your wallet to bear this time around, give the RTX 3080 Ti a look. It has comparable specs and performance, with a more accessible price.

But where the RTX 3090 really shines is in 3D Rendering through applications like Blender and Autodesk Maya. In fact, while in games the RTX 3090 is around 50% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, the 3090 is nearly twice as fast as the Turing flagship in Blender, rendering through the benchmark in just 229 seconds to the RTX 2080 Ti's 438 seconds. That's a 91% improvement, thanks in large part to the sheer amount of VRAM and FP32 performance on offer here. Requirement is made based on PC configured with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor. A lower power rating may work depending on system configuration. 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. 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 RTX 3090 Ti GPU is VR ready. All RTX 30 Series graphics cards can be used to power PCVR. Is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 4K compatible? The RTX 3090 Ti graphics card is 4K / UHD compatible and is ideal for gaming with high FPS at 4K resolutions and beyond. Is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 8K compatible? 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.

Up to 4k 12-bit HDR at 240Hz with DP1.4a+DSC. Up to 8k 12-bit HDR at 60Hz with DP 1.4a+DSC or HDMI2.1+DSC. With dual DP1.4a+DSC, up to 8K HDR at 120Hz Right now, 8K pretty much exclusively exists in the realm of high-end TVs, which means the panels aren't exactly widespread. That will almost certainly change in the coming years, but right now there isn't a single gaming monitor that supports the resolution.Nvidia's impressive Ampere architecture is on full display with the RTX 3090, featuring over 10,000 CUDA cores, second generation RT cores, and third generation Tensor cores to accelerate machine learning tasks. 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. Credit is provided by Novuna Personal Finance, a trading style of Mitsubishi HC Capital (UK) PLC, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Financial Services Register no. 704348. The register can be accessed through http://www.fca.org.uk However, we have to talk about power consumption. At its peak during our testing, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 consumed a maximum of 357 Watts. That's a lot of juice, especially if you're pairing it with a powerful processor. Nvidia recommends a minimum power supply of 750W, but we would go further and just recommend a full 1,000W PSU with this card, just to be sure you don't run into any random shutdowns if your power supply isn't running at peak efficiency.

As we mentioned in our RTX 3080 review, both the Tensor cores and RT cores that Nvidia has made such a huge deal of these past couple graphics card generations see big improvements, too. Namely, throughput of RT cores has doubled with the second-generation ones present on RTX 3000 series cards. Just like its little sibling, the RTX 3080, the RTX 3090 is built on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, using the full-fat GA102 GPU. This time around, we're getting 82 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), making for a total of 10,496 CUDA cores, along with 328 Tensor cores and 82 RT Cores. 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. But you can bet your bottom dollar that we threw this graphics card into our personal machine and tried it across a wide spectrum of PC games, both at 4K and 8K DSR to see how it performs. 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 should be noted that the NVENC encoder is the same here as on the RTX 2080 Ti, which means performance doesn't change much generation-to-generation. However, now that this encoder is supported in Adobe Premiere, nearly the entire video production workflow is now accelerated by the GPU, which makes a dedicated GPU incredibly beneficial to video editors. Encoding a video using the NVENC encoder, rather than through software cuts the time in half – even when we're using the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X paired with 64GB of RAM running at 3,600MHz. If what you're looking to do is dive into the wonderful world of 4K gaming, then honestly the RTX 3090 might be overkill, especially for the price. The RTX 3080 gets 4K@60fps pretty easily and consistently for about half the price of the RTX 3090, so if you're just looking to game, you can save yourself some real money by dropping down just a bit to the next lowest tier. When it comes to gaming performance, we're going to just come out and say it – the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is just 10-20% faster than the RTX 3080 at more than double the price. That increase in performance, if all you're looking for is a gaming card, is absolutely not worth it, and that's ok. These Tensor Cores do more than just power DLSS, however. They're also the technology that enables Nvidia Broadcast, which is by far one of the most underrated features released for this generation. 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.