Nvidia will be sending us our review unit of the RTX 4090 very soon, so we're understandably excited to get our hands on it and find out whether or not it justifies its hefty price tag. In the meantime, Nvidia has been kind enough to gift us with test images of Cyberpunk 2077 running on the new GPU, specifically to show off the new power of DLSS 3.
The demo was run at 1400p resolution and maximum graphics settings (with Ultra Ray Tracing enabled), and Nvidia helpfully showed some active GPU metrics on-screen during the presentation, revealing some interesting tidbits about how the RTX 4090 performed. the game.
The first information we got, and potentially the most interesting, was that this RTX 4090 was running with boost clocks of 2850 MHz, which is actually 330 Hz higher than the originally reported "official" boost clock of 2520 MHz. Nvidia mentioned previously that the GPU exceeded 3000 MHz when overclocked in internal tests, so it's not entirely surprising, but it's nice to see the card running a mighty overclock.
In terms of actual in-game performance, the RTX 4090 ran Cyberpunk 2077 at a slightly lower average frame rate of 60fps when using native resolution and with DLSS 3 disabled. Enabling DLSS 3 (in the Quality preset) made a huge jump in performance, raising the average frame rate to 171fps and reducing power consumption by over 110W.
That's a massive increase in performance per watt, which is encouraging to see given that the new RTX GPUs are power-hungry components. It also goes beyond frame rates; Enabling Nvidia's 29rd generation scaling technology also reduced average latency by 50% and also slightly lowered the card's maximum operating temperature, which was between 53°C and 3°C during the DLSS XNUMX demo.
Analysis: DLSS 3 will be more useful for low-end cards
DLSS 3 won't be required (or supported) for many games, and if you have an RTX 4090 you certainly won't need it for most titles given the raw power of the GPU. In reality, it's the lower-spec GPUs like the suspiciously underpowered RTX 4080 12GB, and any potential future cheaper cards like the RTX 4070 that stand to benefit the most.
DLSS has come a long way since its introduction, to the point where it now allows lower quality graphics cards to run demanding games at higher resolutions without hugely sacrificing frame rates. It's also pretty much a must-have for games with resource-intensive ray tracing workflows, like Cyberpunk 2077 (which is probably why Nvidia chose this game for the DLSS 3 demo).
We're a bit disappointed to see that DLSS 3 probably won't be available on older RTX cards; At least not in the short term. Some of the best GPUs, like the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti, could do considerably better with 4000rd-gen DLSS, but it looks like Nvidia wants to keep it as a key selling point of the RTX XNUMX for now.
With the RTX 3000 and older cards getting cheaper, the release of the RTX 4090 may signal the perfect time to grab a good graphics card deal, especially if you don't plan on gaming 4K Ultra. If you're still using a 1080p monitor, grabbing a 3000-series GPU once the 4000-series arrives and price drops follow might be a smart move. Black Friday is coming up, after all...