GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition

A tour de force for Nvidia's Ada Lovelace

- JARRED WALTON

Nvidia’s RTX 4090 Founders Edition boosts the fan size and thickness of the chunky old RTX 3090.

EVERY COUPLE OF years, the planets align in such a way that allows for the birth of a new generation of graphics cards. Right on schedule, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace has arrived, and with it the new RTX 4090 Founders Edition. It isn’t the biggest 4090 graphics card, that’s Gigabyte’s 4090 Aorus Master. The RTX 3090 Ti paved the way earlier this year, with a 450W TBP (total board power) and support for the new 12VHPWR 16-pin power connector. The RTX 4090 doesn’t increase the power requirements, but performance sees a major jump, potentially the biggest generational boost we’ve seen for GPUs.

The RTX 4090 has more GPU cores and higher clocks than the outgoing 3090 Ti— we saw clocks of 2.7GHz or more while gaming. It’s a theoretical 106 percent improvement in compute performance, but that’s only the start. Real-time ray tracing continues to gain steam and Nvidia is betting big on it—the Ada GPUs include multiple enhancements, such as Shader Execution Reordering, Displacement Micro-Meshes, Opacity Micro-Maps, and twice the triangle/ray intersection rate per RT core that substantially boost RT performance.