Nvidia RTX 3090 Review Roundup: Absolute Creative Power, Maximum Chonk

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Reviews of the RTX 3090 make it clear this GPU is a lot of things. It'southward near the weight of a small roasted craven (RTX 3090: 4.84 pounds; roasted craven: five-7 pounds). Information technology's longer than the Xbox Series X is tall. It'due south a truthful triple-slot GPU and packs 24GB of VRAM. If you lot choose to wield an RTX 3090 every bit an offhand weapon, y'all volition endure a -4 / -8 to attacks due to its off-rest weight and heft. This may be reduced to 0 / -4 if yous took graphics cards as an exotic weapon proficiency.

Beyond these metrics, the RTX 3090 is more. It'south a heck of a lot more expensive than the just-launched RTX 3080 and it offers about ane.15x additional operation compared with that card. Nvidia has used this launch to button the idea that the RTX 3090 is an 8K gaming card or a GPU for ultra-high-end prosumers. Whether that's true is a little more than complicated. 8K gaming isn't in its infancy. 8K gaming is still in the womb.

Nosotros've rounded upwards coverage from multiple publications, including Eurogamer, Hot Hardware, and PC Gamer. The full general opinion on the RTX 3090 is that the 24GB of VRAM tin exist genuinely useful in certain 4K+ content creation workloads. It could also be useful if y'all are working extensively with AI modeling, depending on the needs of your model. As far as its bodily usefulness in gaming, however, 24GB is overkill.

All Summit-Finish GPUs Are Bad Deals, merely Some Are Worse Than Others

In order to talk about whether the RTX 3090 is a skilful deal, nosotros have to sandbox the trouble a scrap. Objectively speaking, the one affair the RTX 3090 offers that the RTX 3080 cannot friction match is the additional 14GB of VRAM. For sure prosumers, this alone can justify the purchase, particularly if you want one GPU for both your 4K+ video editing and your personal gaming without compromising on features or operation for either.

For everyone else, this GPU is an objectively bad deal. The RTX 3080 is (or volition be, once you tin can buy one) half the price and about 85 percent the performance. Given how good Ampere's performance is to beginning with, the RTX 3080 is a bully pick for anyone who wants to game at the highest frame rates and resolutions, but still has a gasp of business organization for affordability and toll/performance ratio. The RTX 3090, non and then much.

But.

The RTX 3090's overall feature gear up is a much better match for its cost point than the RTX 2080 Ti's was. The 8K gaming claim is a little wobbly, simply that's partly because continuing up 8K gaming is itself a piddling wobbly right now. Because basically nobody has 8K displays, Nvidia created an 8K DLSS mode (upscaling 1440p to 8K). It's as well possible to use dynamic super resolution (DSR) to push the resolution up that loftier via supersampling. The reviewers that tested the GPU in 8K all appear to take used this method.

Image by Hot Hardware

Even amongst the relative scattering of customers who buy GPUs like this in the first place, 8K gaming is going to be the nichest of niche applications. Most users volition encounter this carte at 5K or beneath, and it excels at those frame rates, fifty-fifty if they don't show off its advantages over the RTX 3080 to quite the same extent.

The RTX 3090 is not a good value for most customers. But evaluated against previous elevation-end cards, I'd say it's the best value since the GTX 1080 Ti. The general opinion of the reviewers that tested information technology agrees:

Eurogamer writes: "All told then, RTX 3090 is the traditional hard sell for the mainstream gamer just the high-terminate crowd will likely lap information technology up."

Hot Hardware's conclusion echoes the points above. It notes that the GPU is merely 4-xx percent faster than the RTX 3080 for regular gamers before noting: "Consider complex creator workloads which can leverage the GeForce RTX 3090'southward boosted resources and memory, yet, and it is but in another form altogether and can exist many times faster than either the RTX 3080 or Titan RTX."

Image by PC Gamer

PC Gamer besides emphasizes the content creator attribute, stating: "This is the Ampere generation'due south Titan. That's how you justify selling a GeForce GPU, with only xi percent college 4K gaming performance over its closest sibling, with a 114 percent higher sticker cost."

In their conclusion, PCG leans harder into the "Not for gamers" than other reviews, maxim:

This is a toughie considering there are very, very few people who I would recommend the $i,500 RTX 3090 to. And none of them are gamers…This is every inch the Titan carte Jen-Hsun said it would be. It'south a creator'due south card, one with a stunningly powerful GPU and a frame buffer that allows personal creation on a level not seen on a GPU this side of $half-dozen,000.

In short, this GPU may be the best affair that ever happened to you, if you're a creative type with $i,500 to drop on a loftier-end card with dramatically improve performance. The residuum of u.s. can more than make do with the excellently positioned RTX 3080.

Your movement, AMD.