Reviews

The Nvidia 4090 versus everything

Tested against the 4080, 3090, 3080 Ti, and RX 6900 XT.

Jon Peddie

Can’t get enough of that big ’ol 4090? Erstwhile benchmarking king Mark Poppin of Babel TechReviews, a Jon Peddie Research company, ran more than 50 tests on the Nvidia RTX 4090 and four other AIBs to see just what one gets for the money. They ran six synthetic benchmarks at various resolutions and 23 DirectX 12 games at 2560 × 1440 and 3840 × 2160 resolutions. The tests were run in a Gen 13 system with an Intel i9-13900KF.

The results using the Pmark evaluation were not surprising, and the price/performance results were within expectations as well. The Nvidia RTX 4090 was the best price/performance AIB (as shown in Figure 2), and the AMD RX 6900 XT received the best benchmark Pmark scores (as shown in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Pmark results for FPS, TFLOPS, and scores.

Taking into consideration the price (based on current pricing as of the time of this writing) and power (watts), the old RX 6900 XT delivered the highest Pmark values for performer on fps and synthetic scores, but almost any older AIB would win in that comparison. In raw performance, the RTX 4090 was 92% better than the RX 6900 XT.

More critical is how the 4080 performed against the 4090; its price advantage helped in Pmark, but the RTX 4090’s price/performance was 40% better than the RTX 4080, and the RTX 4090’s raw (fps) performance was 29% better.

Figure 2. Price/performance of five AIBs

So, the debate goes on: Is a $2,350 AIB really worth it, or even a $1,300 AIB? We’ll know in a couple of weeks after we report on the new AMD RX 7900 XTX, but our suspicion is it will beat the RTX 4090 in everything except raw performance, and even that might be questionable.