Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Performance

What's the net result of all these improvements? Citius, Altius, Fortius. Or in Nvidia's case: Bigger, faster, better. There's no doubt the RTX 3090 will emerge as Nvidia's fastest GPU ever, and we'd be extremely surprised to see AMD's Big Navi match it. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. But then it's also $1,500, which is enough to build a complete gaming PC with a GeForce RTX 3070.

How much faster will RTX 3090 be in practice, though? That's the tougher question. We've tested a lot of games and graphics cards over the years, and just in 2020 we've encountered several games where the RTX 2080 Ti didn't come in first place until at least 1080p ultra, and sometimes 1440p ultra. In short, the CPU was a bottleneck, and with potentially 2.5 times the GPU performance, it's going to be an even bigger bottleneck with the RTX 3090.

First piece of advice, then: Don't even bother with the RTX 3090 if you're not using a 4K display. There will be games where it's still the fastest GPU even at 1080p, particularly if the games use ray tracing, but I just can't see 1080p being a good fit for this GPU. If you're playing esports games like CSGO, even an RTX 3070 should suffice for 360 fps. If you're not, then you won't get above 200 fps even at minimum settings in many games.

Nvidia provided the above comparison of ray tracing performance, but it didn't state whether this was for RTX 3090 vs. RTX 2080 Ti, or some other comparison like RTX 3080 vs. RTX 2080. Regardless, even at 4K, in most cases the new Ampere GPU isn't able to double the performance of Turing. Maybe there are other factors, but we wager the CPU is holding the graphics card back at least a little.


If you do have a high-end gaming monitor, however, and you want to run with all the bells and whistles? The GeForce RTX 3090 is your best chance at maintaining silky smooth framerates. That will be even more important as the next generation consoles launch and we start to see games use more ray tracing effects.

Besides Cyberpunk 2077, which will use ray tracing for shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, and diffuse illumination (plus DLSS 2.0), Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War will similarly support dynamic lights, shadows, ambient occlusion, and DLSS 2.0. And the RTX 3090 is beefy enough that you can probably even use all of those in multiplayer without tanking your framerates.

In short, while the first generation of ray tracing enhanced games wasn't necessarily a great showcase for the technology (Control and perhaps Minecraft RTX being exceptions), it's not going anywhere. Nearly every movie these days makes use of ray tracing. It might be in its infancy as far as gaming is concerned, but over the coming years we expect to see more games pushing better effects. Just don't be surprised when RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 show up in the coming years and make even the RTX 3090 look anemic.


Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090: The Bottom Line

The biggest unknowns have now been answered. The GeForce RTX 3090 is a graphical tour de force, with a massive 10496 GPU cores delivering up to 36 TFLOPS of compute performance. It will officially launch on September 24, priced at $1,500. Don't be surprised if it sells out, and don't be surprised if many custom designs end up costing far more than $1,500.

That's actually the good part about GeForce RTX 3090 branding instead of Titan branding. Nvidia always did their Titan cards in-house, and third party designs weren't allowed. The result was that the cards cost an arm and a leg (and a kidney as well), for a relatively small increase in performance. This is still an extremely expensive graphics card, of course, but it's $1,000 less than the Titan RTX.

Will the RTX 3090 be worth the price? Probably not, at least in terms of fps per dollar spent. You certainly don't need a $1,500 graphics card to enjoy playing games, and you could buy three RTX 3070 cards for the same asking price. It's arguably more about bragging rights and being the fastest GPU on the planet, price be damned.

If you've got deep pockets, by all means, pre-order an RTX 3090 and get ready to rub it in your friends' noses. Why not order two plus an NVLink connector for good measure? You should seriously consider tossing in an 8K display for good measure. The rest of us will wait to see what the real-world gaming performance looks like come September 24.