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The Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 is the current-gen flagship offering from the company. The card is decked out with the latest technology from Team Green. It is based on the latest Ada Lovelace architecture and is the best money can buy.
AMD, however, is not taking it lightly: the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is here with a much better value proposition and practical performance. The Santa Clara-based manufacturer has been crowned the value king since last-gen. Team Red is not slowing down this generation.
The RTX 4080 is quite close to the RX 7900 XTX in terms of performance. Thus, many users might consider one GPU over the other. In this article, we will go over these offerings and find out which is the best option.
The RTX 4090 — although a fantastic card — isn't for everyone
The RTX 4090 is the fastest card ever built — as we discovered in our review. The GPU is built on a power-efficient design and screams premium in every possible dimension. Gamers will be delighted by what the card has to offer.
We recorded triple-digit framerates in multiple demanding titles at resolutions of up to 4K. But the card feels excessive in many scenarios.
Specs
A look at the specs table reveals the RTX 4090's monstrous power. The lower-end 4080 seems like a massive downgrade, and it is. With over 40% fewer CUDA cores and a smaller 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, the card is about 25% slower than the flagship, according to TechPowerUp's GPU computing power aggregates.
A direct comparison with the RX 7900 XTX, however, is not practical since the AMD flagship is built on a wildly different RDNA 3 architecture.
Performance differences
In terms of performance, we can expect all video cards to impress. The RTX 4090, however, crushes the others by a huge margin in the 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks. These tests judge the rasterization performance using the DirectX 12 and 11 APIs, respectively.
However, in Port Royal, the RX 7900 XTX administers a defeat to both the Nvidia cards. This benchmark tests the ray tracing performance of the GPUs — a proven Team Green stronghold.
These benchmark results prove that none of these video cards will be underwhelming for gaming.
Thanks to Benchmark Lab, we have had some thorough testing results of GPUs in some of the latest and most demanding titles on the market. All games run at 4K at the highest settings unless otherwise mentioned.
These cards can play even the most resource-heavy games flawlessly at 4K 60 FPS without major hiccups. However, the RTX 4090 is in a league of its own. It consistently delivers triple-digit framerates even at 4K with the highest settings applied.
DLSS 3.0 with frame generation technique is another deciding factor when buying GPUs. While AMD is slated to introduce some form of this tech with their upcoming cards, we don't have a release date yet. Meanwhile, Team Green is already impressing us with what AI can achieve.
A closer look at the performance uplift unveils that even the RTX 4080 can hit 120 FPS or more at max settings in UHD in a very demanding title like Microsoft Flight Simulator, where the upscaling tech works in tandem with the CPU to deliver higher framerate bumps. Even the AMD flagship can get close to a hundred frames with FSR.
Thus, although impressive, the RTX 4090 delivers a performance that most gamers do not have a use for. The 7900 XTX and 4080 can already deliver up to 120 FPS in some competitive titles like Warzone 2.0 and Fortnite.
Thus, the RTX 4090 seems more of a professional GPU built for tasks like video editing, 3D modeling, and more. It isn't worth the extra $400-600 over the other options in the market unless someone has deep pockets to exploit.
