Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Reviews

In only 6 years and 3 generations, Nvidia has improved rendering performance by more than 9 times!
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Arstechnica.com did fg from 40-50fps and they say it looks fine.
I have not watched any fg videos tho.
Lag will be rather noticeable at FG from <60 fps. It may work in some titles but generally I'd say it's undesireable, because of lag and more visible artifacting.
 
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I guess
DLSS3 is the same as 2, it just takes the required engine inputs and spits out the frames, there's no engine side improvements to be made at all once it's functional. What you see is what you get.
From a h/w perspective doesn't DLSS3 utilize new fourth-generation Tensor Cores when calculating output?
 
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I have my doubts whether the actual cause is "big changes between frames", though have to admit it does have some clickbait appeal.

Even Digital Foundrys video showed DLSS3 to be picky with frame times and that it prefers a certain range of input data for optimal performance.

As Richard said , you feed DLSS3 garbage and it spits garbage out.
 
Even Digital Foundrys video showed DLSS3 to be picky with frame times and that it prefers a certain range of input data for optimal performance.

As Richard said , you feed DLSS3 garbage and it spits garbage out.
Yeah, I remember his comment because at the time I thought the same would be true for any type of ML output if all sample inputs were blurred/distorted. In this case it would be no different except for the degree (range) of blurred input samples.
 
4090 is 93% faster than 4080 16G at native. That's a weirdly massive difference given the difference in specs.
Again, I suspect a lack of memory bandwidth to be a key reason for such results. It is interesting that they've shown non-RT performance as well.

Also the comparison between 3080 and the 29% more expensive ""4080"" 12G... Yikes!
That's as bad as a comparison between a 3080/10 and a 3090Ti this gen - with 4080/12 being closer to the latter.
But yeah, perf/price improvements will probably hit zero below 4080/12 with such prices.
 
Yeah, interestingly gains in path traced applications don't seem to be out of the ordinary. I wonder if this is another indication of insufficient memory bandwidth increases.
You mean applications that are mostly or completely ray traced, with minimum or inexistent rasterization? I would guess it's simply way heavier than mixed rendering, so expected, as there is still more rasterization hardware in it that Ray Tracing? What makes you think it's a memory bandwidth issue?
 
Looking at the average clock speeds of the 4090 it seems to run at a clock speed that's 50% higher on average than the 3090.

And then factor in ~60% more 'shader' cores and it should actually be performing higher and scaling better than it actually is.

The only reason I can see that would cause this kind of scaling is memory bandwidth as it's not really seen an increase to match the increased compute performance.

I have previously mentioned that AMD and Nvidia may need to start looking at HBM memory as these cards are really stretching GDDR now and surely at some point the cost of GDDR must be approaching HBM cost.
 
You mean applications that are mostly or completely ray traced, with minimum or inexistent rasterization?
Path traced so yes.

I would guess it's simply way heavier than mixed rendering, so expected, as there is still more rasterization hardware in it that Ray Tracing? What makes you think it's a memory bandwidth issue?
Lovelace scales way further in RT than in rasterization, most RT benchmarks show this. This implies that a purely RT application must scale the most between Ampere and Lovelace but alas this isn't the case - they seem to scale in line with "hybrid" raster+RT engines. This is a weird outcome considering that said "hybrid" engines themselves tend to scale better than pure raster ones, and one possible explanation is the comparatively low memory bandwidth improvements on Lovelace - PT is very memory bandwidth intensive.

Another possible explanation though is that these pure rasterization engines don't scale as well as "hybrid" or PT ones because they are CPU limited more often.
 
The 4090 is a monster but for how much more engineered over the 3090 Ti, shouldn’t we be seeing way more performance? Why is the scaling so poor? Have we hit a wall regarding game engines, cpus, or something else?
 
Path traced so yes.


Lovelace scales way further in RT than in rasterization, most RT benchmarks show this. This implies that a purely RT application must scale the most between Ampere and Lovelace but alas this isn't the case - they seem to scale in line with "hybrid" raster+RT engines. This is a weird outcome considering that said "hybrid" engines themselves tend to scale better than pure raster ones, and one possible explanation is the comparatively low memory bandwidth improvements on Lovelace - PT is very memory bandwidth intensive.

Another possible explanation though is that these pure rasterization engines don't scale as well as "hybrid" or PT ones because they are CPU limited more often.
Or that in mixed rendering the RT hardware is simply not being taxed as much (in other words RT hardware for mixed rendering is now overkill, excluding Psycho CP2077)? I still think it's more about the workload than anything else. Are there any benchmarks showing energy consumption of mixed rendering versus path tracing? It would be interesting to see if there is a significant difference.
 
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