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Launched on October 12 as a part of the Ada Lovelace-based RTX 40 series lineup, RTX 4090 is the current best-in-class graphics card offering from Nvidia.
With eye-watering specs, the GPU is an engineering feat and is much faster than its last-gen equivalent, the RTX 3090 Ti. However, the GPU has been priced at a hefty premium of $1,600, which makes it $100 costlier than the RTX 3090's introductory price.
While several gamers have justified the price hike by citing reasons such as inflation and chip shortages, many gamers still feel uncomfortable dumping such a lump sum on a video card.
Only one aspect makes the RTX 4090 attractive and unattractive at the same time
The RTX 4090 is very impressive on paper. It is based on the flagship AD102 GPU and comes with a mind-boggling 16,384 CUDA cores. The GPU also packs 512 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 176 Render Output Units (ROPs), and a whopping 24 GB GDDR6X video memory which is based on a 384-bit bus.
These specs translate very well to gaming performance. According to the performance charts published by Nvidia, the RTX 4090 is the fastest gaming GPU in the world. It outperforms its last-gen counterparts by a large margin.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is a CPU intensive game, the RTX 4090 has a solid lead over the last-gen RTX 3090 Ti. It is also marginally faster than RTX 4080. It is worth noting that the RTX 4080 12 GB card is now canceled and users should ignore its performance metrics.
In a more graphically demanding scenario provided by A Plague Tale: Requiem, the 4090 takes a massive lead over any other graphics card on the list. It is almost twice as fast as the last-gen RTX 3090 Ti.
Thus, the 4090 is undoubtedly a very fast video card in terms of gaming performance. The graphics card also packs unmatched productivity performance levels. However, there are a couple of reasons why users should either not upgrade to this card or hold their upgrade for a week or so.
AMD is expected to announce its RX 7000 series on November 3. If rumors are to be believed, the RX 7900 XT will be a solid competitor to the 4090. Despite being a flagship GPU, the 4090 is not a very power efficient card, and is also physically very large. The AMD RX 7000 option is supposed to solve these issues.
In addition to this, the RTX 4090 is fairly expensive. Several graphics cards from the RTX 30 series and RX 6000 series are capable of running every modern AAA title at a very decent framerate, and there are very few users who can utilize the maximum power of the 4090.
Conclusion
Considering the very high price of the RTX 4090, it becomes an unappealing choice. However, provided that several cheaper and more efficient designs can game pretty well, purchasing the 4090 becomes a non-sensible decision
It is worth noting that the 4090 is a great video card and can game quite well. Thus, anyone who has the budget and is willing to splurge $1,600 for the video card should go for it.
