Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review

When talking about the RTX 4090's performance, there's absolutely nothing to compare it to. Everything we've seen so far suggests as much as a 70% performance gain over the RTX 3090 in some scenarios. AMD will have to throw some serious heat to keep up, and until the RTX 4080 arrives, the 4090 is almost in a vacuum.

There are plenty of reasons to buy an RTX 4090 but those aren't necessarily reasons why you should buy one. To most people reading this, I can quite confidently say you don't need one. You could spend the money more wisely and build an entire PC for the same price. As exciting as it is, it's completely overkill.

You have to game consistently at 4K if you're entertaining buying one. There are still times that you can trip it up mildly at 1440p with a lot of ray-traced reflections. But largely, if you play games on this below 4K resolution, it's just going to laugh at you. Nothing you can throw at this graphics card right now will truly phase it.

It's also not necessarily the smartest buy if your sole purpose is gaming. It's just so ridiculously powerful. Enthusiasts and those who enjoy overclocking and pushing hardware to its breaking point will absolutely love it, and largely need no justification to buy one. But even if it is up to 70% better at times than the RTX 3090, no games exist right now that are remotely challenging to it.

The RTX 4090 makes the most sense when combined with something else, whether you're leveraging GPU acceleration in machine learning or creative work, or you're looking for something to game and stream with on a single machine. When you step back from just gaming and appreciate everything else you get with this graphics card, it's easier to make it make sense.

Generation on generation, the RTX 4090 is a huge leap and hasn't come with a huge price increase. But it's still very expensive and quite probably not what you need. But if you fall into owning one, you'll have an insane experience. It's like getting out of a Volvo and into a Lamborghini. Nothing can touch this graphics card right now. We'll have to wait for Nvidia to do that to itself.